art brut

Jotunheimen

I did not see any troll in this land of the giants. Presumably, we were flying too high…

back in time…

semi-automatic ABC [reply]

When I came back from LGM2012 in Trondheim, I found the latest issue of Series B on my desk. It is much thicker than in “my” days, with about 250 pages in this June 2012 issue! (One reason is that it contains two Read Papers with their discussions, amounting to 110 pages of the journal.) The first Read Paper was “Catching up faster by switching sooner” by van Erven, Grünwald and de Rooij, that we discussed with Nicolas Chopin. There are also comments (among others!) from Stephen Lauritzen, Iain Murray, and Aki Vehtari, who also spoke about Bayesian model evaluation tools at LGM2012. The second Read Paper is Fearnhead’s and Prangle’s semi-automatic ABC that I discussed last December. I have already posted about this Read Paper and used some of the discussion in preparing my ABC PhD class in Roma.  However, the remark we made in our discussion with Jean-Michel Marin that the Bayes factor would not be a pertinent summary statistic for model choice is wrong, as shown by Dennis Prangle in his poster at the workshop in Bristol. And, when reading the reply by Paul Fearnhead and Dennis Prangle, I do not see a satisfactory answer to my demand of more formal conditions for Theorem 2 and its corollary, the convergence of the noisy ABC posterior to the true parameter (page 425), to apply. (Such results exist in indirect inference.)

Trondheim, wooden houses