## new MCMC algorithm for Bayesian variable selection

Posted in pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , on February 25, 2014 by xi'an

Unfortunately, I will miss the incoming Bayes in Paris seminar next Thursday (27th February), as I will be flying to Montréal and then Québec at the time (despite having omitted to book a flight till now!). Indeed Amandine Shreck will give a talk at 2pm in room 18 of ENSAE, Malakoff, on A shrinkage-thresholding Metropolis adjusted Langevin algorithm for Bayesian variable selection, a work written jointly with Gersende Fort, Sylvain Le Corff, and Eric Moulines, and arXived at the end of 2013 (which may explain why I missed it!). Here is the abstract:

This paper introduces a new Markov Chain Monte Carlo method to perform Bayesian variable selection in high dimensional settings. The algorithm is a Hastings-Metropolis sampler with a proposal mechanism which combines (i) a Metropolis adjusted Langevin step to propose local moves associated with the differentiable part of the target density with (ii) a shrinkage-thresholding step based on the non-differentiable part of the target density which provides sparse solutions such that small components are shrunk toward zero. This allows to sample from distributions on spaces with different dimensions by actually setting some components to zero. The performances of this new procedure are illustrated with both simulated and real data sets. The geometric ergodicity of this new transdimensional Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampler is also established.

(I will definitely get a look at the paper over the coming days!)

## MCMSki IV [day 3]

Posted in Mountains, pictures, R, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 9, 2014 by xi'an

Already on the final day..! And still this frustration in being unable to attend three sessions at once… Andrew Gelman started the day with a non-computational talk that broached on themes that are familiar to readers of his blog, on the misuse of significance tests and on recommendations for better practice. I then picked the Scaling and optimisation of MCMC algorithms session organised by Gareth Roberts, with optimal scaling talks by Tony Lelièvre, Alex Théry and Chris Sherlock, while Jochen Voss spoke about the convergence rate of ABC, a paper I already discussed on the blog. A fairly exciting session showing that MCMC’ory (name of a workshop I ran in Paris in the late 90′s!) is still well and alive!

After the break (sadly without the ski race!), the software round-table session was something I was looking for. The four softwares covered by this round-table were BUGS, JAGS, STAN, and BiiPS, each presented according to the same pattern. I would have like to see a “battle of the bands”, illustrating pros & cons for each language on a couple of models & datasets. STAN got the officious prize for cool tee-shirts (we should have asked the STAN team for poster prize tee-shirts). And I had to skip the final session for a flu-related doctor appointment…

I called for a BayesComp meeting at 7:30, hoping for current and future members to show up and discuss the format of the future MCMski meetings, maybe even proposing new locations on other “sides of the Italian Alps”! But (workshop fatigue syndrome?!), no-one showed up. So anyone interested in discussing this issue is welcome to contact me or David van Dyk, the new BayesComp program chair.

## MCMSki [day 2]

Posted in Mountains, pictures, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , on January 8, 2014 by xi'an

I was still feeling poorly this morning with my brain in a kind of flu-induced haze so could not concentrate for a whole talk, which is a shame as I missed most of the contents of the astrostatistics session put together by David van Dyk… Especially the talk by Roberto Trotta I was definitely looking for. And the defence of nested sampling strategies for marginal likelihood approximations. Even though I spotted posterior distributions for WMAP and Plank data on the ΛCDM that reminded me of our own work in this area… Apologies thus to all speakers for dozing in and out, it was certainly not due to a lack of interest!

Sebastian Seehars mentioned emcee (for ensemble Monte Carlo), with a corresponding software nicknamed “the MCMC hammer”, and their own CosmoHammer software. I read the paper by Goodman and Ware (2010) this afternoon during the ski break (if not on a ski lift!). Actually, I do not understand why an MCMC should be affine invariant: a good adaptive MCMC sampler should anyway catch up the right scale of the target distribution. Other than that, the ensemble sampler reminds me very much of the pinball sampler we developed with Kerrie Mengersen (1995 Valencia meeting), where the target is the product of L targets,

$\pi(x_1)\cdots\pi(x_L)$

and a Gibbs-like sampler can be constructed, moving one component (with index k, say) of the L-sample at a time. (Just as in the pinball sampler.) Rather than avoiding all other components (as in the pinball sampler), Goodman and Ware draw a single other component at random  (with index j, say) and make a proposal away from it:

$\eta=x_j(t) + \zeta \{x_k(t)-x_j(t)\}$

where ζ is a scale random variable with (log-) symmetry around 1. The authors claim improvement over a single track Metropolis algorithm, but it of course depends on the type of Metropolis algorithms that is chosen… Overall, I think the criticism of the pinball sampler also applies here: using a product of targets can only slow down the convergence. Further, the affine structure of the target support is not a given. Highly constrained settings should not cope well with linear transforms and non-linear reparameterisations would be more efficient….

## “an outstanding paper that covers the Jeffreys-Lindley paradox”…

Posted in Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , on December 4, 2013 by xi'an

“This is, in this revised version, an outstanding paper that covers the Jeffreys-Lindley paradox (JLP) in exceptional depth and that unravels the philosophical differences between different schools of inference with the help of the JLP. From the analysis of this paradox, the author convincingly elaborates the principles of Bayesian and severity-based inferences, and engages in a thorough review of the latter’s account of the JLP in Spanos (2013).” Anonymous

I have now received a second round of reviews of my paper, “On the Jeffreys-Lindleys paradox” (submitted to Philosophy of Science) and the reports are quite positive (or even extremely positive as in the above quote!). The requests for changes are directed to clarify points, improve the background coverage, and simplify my heavy style (e.g., cutting Proustian sentences). These requests were easily addressed (hopefully to the satisfaction of the reviewers) and, thanks to the week in Warwick, I have already sent the paper back to the journal, with high hopes for acceptance. The new version has also been arXived. I must add that some parts of the reviews sounded much better than my original prose and I was almost tempted to include them in the final version. Take for instance

“As a result, the reader obtains not only a better insight into what is at stake in the JLP, going beyond the results of Spanos (2013) and Sprenger (2013), but also a much better understanding of the epistemic function and mechanics of statistical tests. This is a major achievement given the philosophical controversies that have haunted the topic for decades. Recent insights from Bayesian statistics are integrated into the article and make sure that it is mathematically up to date, but the technical and foundational aspects of the paper are well-balanced.” Anonymous

## a talk with Jay

Posted in Books, Running, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , on November 1, 2013 by xi'an

I had a wonderful time in CMU, talking with a lot of faculty about their research (and mine), like reminiscing of things past and expanding on things to come with Larry (not to mention exchanging blogging impressions), giving my seminar talk, having a great risotto at Casbah, and a nice dinner at Legume, going for morning runs in the nearby park… One particularly memorable moment was the discussion I had with Jay as/since he went back to our diverging views about objective Bayes and improper priors, as expressed in the last chapter of his book and my review of it. While we kept disagreeing on their relevance and on whether or not they should be used, I had to concede that one primary reason for using reference priors is one of laziness in not seeking expert opinions. Even though there always is a limit to the information provided by such experts that means a default input at one level or the next (of a hierarchical model). Jay also told me of his proposal (as reported in his 1996 Bayesian methods and ethics in a clinical trial design book) for conducting clinical trials with several experts (with different priors) and sequentially weighting them by their predictive success. Proposal which made me think of a sequential way to compare models by their predictive abilities and still use improper priors…