Introduction This weekend I’ve been preparing some material for my upcoming Scala for statistical computing short course. As part of the course, I thought it would be useful to walk through how to think about and structure MCMC codes, and in particular, how to think about MCMC algorithms as infinite streams of state. This material … Continue reading MCMC as a Stream
For many years I’ve had a passing interest in functional programming and languages which support functional programming approaches. I’m also quite interested in MOOCs and their future role in higher education. So I recently signed up for my first on-line course, Functional Programming Principles in Scala, via Coursera. I’m around half way through the course […]
For many years I’ve had a passing interest in functional programming and languages which support functional programming approaches. I’m also quite interested in MOOCs and their future role in higher education. So I recently signed up for my first on-line course, Functional Programming Principles in Scala, via Coursera. I’m around half way through the course […]
Please note that this is programming I purely did for the learning experience. The pure R bubble sort implemented in this post is veeeeery slow for two reasons: Interpreted code with lots of iteration is very slow. Bubble sort is… See more ›
The little half puzzle proposed a “dumb’ solution in that players play a minimax strategy. There are 34 starting values less than 100 guaranteeing a sure win to dumb players. If instead the players maximise their choice at each step, the R code looks like this: and there are now 66 (=100-34, indeed!) starting values [...]
Another problem generated by X’validated (on which I spent much too much time!): given an unbiased coin that produced M heads in the first M tosses, what is the expected number of additional tosses needed to get N (N>M) consecutive heads? Consider the preliminary question of getting a sequence of N heads out of k [...]
