Metropolis gets off the ground

Posted in Books, Kids, Statistics with tags , , , , , , , on April 1, 2019 by xi'an

An X validated discussion that toed-and-froed about an incomprehension of the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm. Which started with a blame of George Casella‘s and Roger Berger’s Statistical Inference (p.254), when the real issue was the inquisitor having difficulties with the notation V ~ f(v), or the notion of random variable [generation], mistaking identically distributed with identical. Even (me) crawling from one iteration to the next did not help at the beginning. Another illustration of the strong tendency on this forum to jettison fundamental prerequisites…

take a random integer

Posted in Books, Statistics with tags , , on February 16, 2019 by xi'an

A weird puzzle from FiveThirtyEight: what is the probability that the product of three random integers is a multiple of 100? Ehrrrr…, what is a random integer?! The solution provided by the Riddler is quite stunning

Reading the question charitably (since “random integer” has no specific meaning), there will be an answer if there is a limit for a uniform distribution of positive integers up to some number . But we can ignore that technicality, and make do with the idealization that since every second, fourth, fifth, and twenty-fifth integer are divisible by and , the chances of getting a random integer divisible by those numbers are , , , and .

as it acknowledges that the question is meaningless, then dismisses this as a “technicality” and still handles a Uniform random integer on {1,2,…,N} as N grows to infinity! Since all that matters is the remainder of the “random variable” modulo 100, this remainder will see its distribution vary as N moves to infinity, even though it indeed stabilises for $N$ large enough…