
Chapter 13
Inherently Statistical
Approaches: Subset
Methods
A recurrent theme in this book has been that it is easy to speed up embar-
rassingly parallel (EP) applications, but the rest can be quite a challenge.
Fortunately, there exist methods for converting many non-EP statistical
problems to EP ones that are equivalent or reasonable substitutes.
I call this software alchemy. Such methods will be presented in this chapter,
with the main focus being on one method in particular, Chunk Averaging
(CA). Brief overviews will also be given of two other methods.
Let’s set some notation. It will be helpful to have at hand the concept of a
“typical rectangular ...