## AI and Statistics 2014

Posted in Kids, Mountains, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , on April 18, 2014 by xi'an

Today, I am leaving Paris for a 8 day stay in Iceland! This is quite exciting, for many reasons: first, I missed the AISTATS 2013 last year as I was still in the hospital;  second, I am giving a short short tutorial on ABC methods which will be more like a long (two hours)  talk; third, it gives me the fantastic opportunity to visit Iceland for a few days, a place that was top of my wish list of countries to visit. The weather forecast is rather bleak but I am bring enough waterproof layers to withstand a wee bit of snow and rain… The conference proper starts next Tuesday, April 22, with the tutorials taking place next Friday, April 25. Hence leaving me three completely free days for exploring the area near Reykjavik.

## Dan Simpson’s seminar at CREST

Posted in Kids, Mountains, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , on April 18, 2014 by xi'an

Daniel Simpson gave a seminar at CREST yesterday on his recently arXived paper, “Penalising model component complexity: A principled, practical  approach to constructing priors” written with Thiago Martins, Andrea Riebler, Håvard Rue, and Sigrunn Sørbye. Paper that he should also have given in Banff last month had he not lost his passport in København airport…  I have already commented at length on this exciting paper, hopefully to become a discussion paper in a top journal!, so I am just pointing out two things that came to my mind during the energetic talk delivered by Dan to our group. The first thing is that those penalised complexity (PC) priors of theirs rely on some choices in the ordering of the relevance, complexity, nuisance level, &tc. of the parameters, just like reference priors. While Dan already wrote a paper on Russian roulette, there is also a Russian doll principle at work behind (or within) PC priors. Each shell of the Russian doll corresponds to a further level of complexity whose order need be decided by the modeller… Not very realistic in a hierarchical model with several types of parameters having only local meaning.

My second point is that the construction of those “politically correct” (PC) priors reflects another Russian doll structure, namely one of embedded models, hence would and should lead to a natural multiple testing methodology. Except that Dan rejected this notion during his talk, by being opposed to testing per se. (A good topic for one of my summer projects, if nothing more, then!)

## Journées MAS2014, Toulouse, Aug. 27-29

Posted in Kids, pictures, Travel, University life, Wines with tags , , , , , , , on April 16, 2014 by xi'an

For those interested in visiting Toulouse at the end of the summer for a French speaking conference in Probability and Statistics, the Modélisation-Aléatoire-Statistique branch of SMAI (the French version of SIAM) is holding its yearly conference. The main theme this year is “High dimension phenomena”, but a large panel of the French research in Probability and Statistics will be represented. The program contains in particular:

• Six plenary conferences and 3 talks by the recent winners of the “Prix Jacques Neveu” award [including Pierre Jacob!],
• 22 parallel sessions, from probability theory to applied statistics and machine learning,
• Posters session for students

More detail is available on the conference website (in French).  (The organizing committee is made of Aurélien Garivier, Sébastien Gerchinovitz, Aldéric Joulin, Clément Pellegrini, and Laurent Risser.)

## MCqMC 2014 [closup]

Posted in pictures, Running, Statistics, Travel, University life, Wines with tags , , , , , , , on April 16, 2014 by xi'an

As mentioned earlier, this was my very first MCqMC conference and I really enjoyed it, even though (or because) there were many topics that did not fall within my areas of interest. (By comparison, WSC is a serie of conferences too remote from those areas for my taste, as I realised in Berlin where we hardly attended any talk and hardly anyone attended my session!) Here I appreciated the exposure to different mathematical visions on Monte Carlo, without being swamped by applications as at WSC… Obviously, our own Bayesian computational community was much less represented than at, say, MCMSki! Nonetheless, I learned a lot during this conference for instance from Peter Glynn‘s fantastic talk, and I came back home with new problems and useful references [as well as a two-hour delay in the train ride from Brussels]. I also obviously enjoyed the college-town atmosphere of Leuven, the many historical landmarks  and the easily-found running routes out of the town. I am thus quite eager to attend the next MCqMC 2016 meeting (in Stanford, an added bonus!) and even vaguely toying with the idea of organising MCqMC 2018 in Monaco (depending on the return for ISBA 2016 and ISBA 2018). In any case, thanks to the scientific committee for the invitation to give a plenary lecture in Leuven and to the local committee for a perfect organisation of the meeting.

$\prod_{i=1}^n\frac{L(\theta^\prime|x_i)}{L(\theta|x_i)}.$