Monthly Archives: November 2013

Movie about a healthy algorithm for matching kidney transplants

This is a fun movie. Nice motion graphics, and camera work. The sound design is good too, although I found the jazz in the background distracting. And I love this research area. I think some colleagues at CMU were starting to work on it right when I was leaving grad school. I’ll share it on healthy algorithms went I have some time to post things.

–Abie

From: Sommer Gentry
Sent: Monday, November 11, 2013 12:25 PM
To: abie
Subject: a movie link for Healthy Algorithms?

Dear Abraham,

I hope this email finds you well. I am enjoying your blog!

I am writing to let you know about a short documentary that features me and my husband and a nice mathematical modeling problem for helping people get kidney transplants. Its moving principle is to sell operations research to a lay audience by explaining the kidney exchange problem in great detail. It has some nice animations that describe the steps of modeling and solving an integer program, at a level for absolute beginners.

Maybe you’d find it interesting enough to put on your blog. In any case, thanks for checking it out.

best,
Sommer

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Filed under combinatorial optimization

MCMC Convergence Diagnostics

I have revisited my approach to deciding if MCMC has run for long enough recently, and I’m collecting some of the relevant material here:

Last time I thought about it: https://healthyalgorithms.com/2010/04/19/practical-mcmc-advice-when-to-stop/

Original paper for R_hat approach: http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/itsim.pdf

Presentation comparing several approaches: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~plam/teaching/methods/convergence/convergence_print.pdf

Published comparison: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2291683

Blog about a cool visual approach: http://andrewgelman.com/2009/12/24/visualizations_1/

Discussion on cross-validated: http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/507/what-is-the-best-method-for-checking-convergence-in-mcmc

Book with a chapter on this referenced there: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1441915753/?tag=stackoverfl08-20 (available as an eBook from UW Library, how convenient!)

Another related blog: http://xianblog.wordpress.com/2012/11/28/mcmc-convergence-assessment/

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Filed under statistics