On 05/10/2018, 09:45, "R-help on behalf of hmh" <r-help-boun...@r-project.org
on behalf of hug...@gmx.fr> wrote:
Hi,
Thanks William for this fast answer, and sorry for sending the 1st mail
to r-help instead to r-devel.
I noticed that bug while I was simulating many small random walks using
c(0,cumsum(rnorm(10))). Then the negative auto-correlation was inducing
a muchsmaller space visited by the random walks than expected if there
would be no auto-correlation in the samples.
The code I provided and you optimized was only provided to illustrated
and investigate that bug.
It is really worrying that most of the R distributions are affected by
this bug !!!!
What I did should have been one of the first check done for _*each*_
distributions by the developers of these functions !
And if as you suggested this is a "tolerated" _error_ of the algorithm,
I do think this is a bad choice, but any way, this should have been
mentioned in the documentations of the functions !!
cheers,
hugo
This is not a bug. You have simply rediscovered the finite-sample bias in the
sample autocorrelation coefficient, known at least since
Kendall, M. G. (1954). Note on bias in the estimation of autocorrelation.
Biometrika, 41(3-4), 403-404.
The bias is approximately -1/T, with T sample size, which explains why it seems
to disappear in the larger sample sizes you consider.
Jan
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