After the complete solution manual for Bayesian Core, the solution manual for the odd numbered exercises of “Introducing Monte Carlo Methods with R” is now arXived. The fuller 133 page version for instructors is available from Springer Verlag by demand only, in order to keep the appeal of the book as a textbook (even though this is open to debate). Since the LaTeX code is available from the arXiv deposit, it can also be used and modified freely. (It may be argued that publishing a solution manual on arXiv is somehow borderline, because, while it is hopefully useful to readers and original, it does not truly qualify as research. And won’t be published anywhere else. I agree with this perspective but the final decision was up to the administrators of the site who did not object. So I do not complain!)
The warnings associated with publishing the complete solution manual for Bayesian Core, are worth repeating with this solution manual for “Introducing Monte Carlo Methods with R”, namely that “some self-study readers will undoubtedly come to the realisation that the solutions provided here are too sketchy for them because the way we wrote those solutions assumes some minimal familiarity with the maths, with the probability theory and with the statistics behind the arguments. There is unfortunately a limit to the time and to the efforts we can dedicate to this solution manual“, which is about a week for both manuals. As of earlier, comments and suggestions are welcome.
should be written 
to be coherent with the notation of Example 5.14
should not be in bold fonts (!)![\mathbb{E} \left[\exp-X^2|y\right] = \frac{1}{\sqrt{2 \pi \sigma^2/y}}\int\exp\{-x^2\}\,\exp\{-(x-\mu)^2y/2\sigma^2\}\,\text{d}x](https://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=%5Cmathbb%7BE%7D+%5Cleft%5B%5Cexp-X%5E2%7Cy%5Cright%5D+%3D+%5Cfrac%7B1%7D%7B%5Csqrt%7B2+%5Cpi+%5Csigma%5E2%2Fy%7D%7D%5Cint%5Cexp%5C%7B-x%5E2%5C%7D%5C%2C%5Cexp%5C%7B-%28x-%5Cmu%29%5E2y%2F2%5Csigma%5E2%5C%7D%5C%2C%5Ctext%7Bd%7Dx&bg=000000&fg=B0B0B0&s=0&c=20201002)
should be 
(as in Problem 4.5 of 
random variables would be needed to calculate P(Z > 4.5) to the same accuracy obtained from using 100 random variables in this importance sampler.”
, not 
LaTeX surprises
Posted in Books, University life with tags comments, Introducing Monte Carlo Methods with R, LaTeX, solution manual, typos, verbatim on January 18, 2010 by xi'anWhen compiling the solution manual to “Introducing Monte Carlo Methods with R” into a version with only the odd-numbered exercises, I used a \relax{…} command to comment out the even-numbered solutions. This produced a strange bug when applied to a paragraph that included the lines
\begin{verbatim} > system.time({for (t in 1:100) y=rmnorm(n=1,var=Sigma)}) user system elapsed 0.028 0.000 0.028 \end{verbatim}as somehow the curly bracket } in the group of commands was understood as the end of the \relax command. It took me a while to spot the reason for this bug as I implicitely assumed that anything within the verbatim environment was not understood as a LaTeX command. But the bug was also helpful in pointing out an extra curly bracket } in an R code provided as a solution (within the verbatim environment). While switching between the long and the short versions of the solution manual to “Introducing Monte Carlo Methods with R”, I also found a point I had been seeking for a while, namely that
\begin{comment} \subsection{Exercise \ref{exo:helpme}} Test the \verb+help+ command on the functions \verb+seq+, \verb+sample+, and \verb+order+. \end{comment}works out nicely to comment out whole paragraphs once the verbatim package is included. However, if I try to shorten the syntax by defining
\newcommand\become{\begin{comment}} \newcommand\begone{\end{comment}}I get a compilation error
Strange, isn’t it?!
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