Via Frequentist inference only seems easy Bayesian methods are not necessarily more painful that frequentist procedures. The Bayesian estimation procedure requires more from the user (the priors) and has an expensive and complicated convolution step to use the data to relate the priors to the posteriors (unless you are lucky enough to have something like the theory of conjugate distributions to hide this step). The frequentist estimation procedure seems to be as simple as “copy over your empirical observation as your estimate.

The central theme of this book is — major governments & central banks around the world have been waging a war on “gold” to keep its price low. The reason being, they want everyone to believe in their fiat currency, so that they can print away the money to solve their temporary problems. The author strongly believes that by 2020, no amount of “managing gold price” tactics will work. Dollar will lose its supremacy and gold prices will skyrocket to represent its true value.

Monaco has the highest life expectancy at birth, 89.57 years as per 2014 estimate. One might think that the country has exceptional living conditions that have given rise to such a stellar life expectancy level. However the actual reason for such a statistic is explained via, “Inspection Paradox”, a famous paradox from Renewal theory. Link : On the Persistence of Bad Luck (and Good)

One of my friends sent me a paper titled, “Path to Purchase: A Mutually Exciting Point Process Model for Online Advertising and Conversion”. Not knowing most of the marketing jargon in the paper, I had to read it slowly. After going through the paper, I have realized that it is a superb application of point processes to measuring effectiveness of online advertising. In finance, there are tons of papers published that use Hawke’s process for modeling.