## teaching Bayesian statistics in HoChiMin City

Posted in Books, Kids, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , on June 5, 2013 by xi'an

Today, I gave my course at the University of Sciences (Truòng Dai hoc) here in Saigon in front of 40 students. It was a bit of a crash course and I covered between four and five chapters of The Bayesian Choice in about six hours. This was exhausting both for them and for me, but I managed to keep writing on the blackboard till the end and they bravely managed to keep their focus till the end as well. Since the students were of various backgrounds different from maths and stats (even though some were completing PhD’s involving Bayesian tools) I do wonder how much they sifted from this crash course, apart from my oft repeated messages that everyone had to pick a prior rather than go fishing for the prior… (No pho tday but a spicy beef stew and banh xeo local pancakes!) Here are the slides for the students:

## Đôi nét về GS. Xi’an

Posted in Books, Travel, University life with tags , , , , on May 28, 2013 by xi'an

Here is a short bio of me written in Vietnamese in conjunction with the course I will give at CMS (Centre for Mathematical Sciences), Ho Chi Min City, next week:

Christian P. Robert là giáo sư tại Khoa Toán ứng dụng của ĐH Paris Dauphine từ năm 2000. GS Robert đã từng giảng dạy ở các ĐH Perdue, Cornell (Mỹ) và ĐH Canterbury (New-Zealand). Ông đã làm biên tập cho tạp chí Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B từ năm 2006 đến năm 2009 và là phó biên tập cho tạp chí Annals of Statistics. Năm 2008, ông làm Chủ tịch của Hiệp hội Thống kê Quốc tế về Thống kê Bayes (ISBA). Lĩnh vực nghiên cứu của GS Robert bao gồm Thống kê Bayes mà tập trung chính vào Lý thuyết quyết định (Decision theory) và Mô hình lựa chọn (Model selection), Lý thuyết về Xích Markov trong mô phỏng và Thống kê tính toán.

## Robins and Wasserman

Posted in Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , on January 17, 2013 by xi'an

As I attended Jamie Robins’ session in Varanasi and did not have a clear enough idea of the Robbins and Wasserman paradox to discuss it viva vocce, here are my thoughts after reading Larry’s summary. My first reaction was to question whether or not this was a Bayesian statistical problem (meaning why should I be concered with the problem). Just as the normalising constant problem was not a statistical problem. We are estimating an integral given some censored realisations of a binomial depending on a covariate through an unknown function θ(x). There is not much of a parameter. However, the way Jamie presented it thru clinical trials made the problem sound definitely statistical. So end of the silly objection. My second step is to consider the very point of estimating the entire function (or infinite dimensional parameter) θ(x) when only the integral ψ is of interest. This is presumably the reason why the Bayesian approach fails as it sounds difficult to consistently estimate θ(x) under censored binomial observations, while ψ can be. Of course, if we want to estimate the probability of a success like ψ going through functional estimation this sounds like overshooting. But the Bayesian modelling of the problem appears to require considering all unknowns at once, including the function θ(x) and cannot forget about it. We encountered a somewhat similar problem with Jean-Michel Marin when working on the k-nearest neighbour classification problem. Considering all the points in the testing sample altogether as unknowns would dwarf the training sample and its information content to produce very poor inference. And so we ended up dealing with one point at a time after harsh and intense discussions! Now, back to the Robins and Wasserman paradox, I see no problem in acknowledging a classical Bayesian approach cannot produce a convergent estimate of the integral ψ. Simply because the classical Bayesian approach is an holistic system that cannot remove information to process a subset of the original problem. Call it the curse of marginalisation. Now, on a practical basis, would there be ways of running simulations of the missing Y’s when π(x) is known in order to achieve estimates of ψ? Presumably, but they would end up with a frequentist validation…

## testing via credible sets

Posted in Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , on October 8, 2012 by xi'an

Måns Thulin released today an arXiv document on some decision-theoretic justifications for [running] Bayesian hypothesis testing through credible sets. His main point is that using the unnatural prior setting mass on a point-null hypothesis can be avoided by rejecting the null when the point-null value of the parameter does not belong to the credible interval and that this decision procedure can be validated through the use of special loss functions. While I stress to my students that point-null hypotheses are very unnatural and should be avoided at all cost, and also that constructing a confidence interval is not the same as designing a test—the former assess the precision in the estimation, while the later opposes two different and even incompatible models—, let us consider Måns’ arguments for their own sake.

The idea of the paper is that there exist loss functions for testing point-null hypotheses that lead to HPD, symmetric and one-sided intervals as acceptance regions, depending on the loss func. This was already found in Pereira & Stern (1999). The issue with these loss functions is that they involve the corresponding credible sets in their definition, hence are somehow tautological. For instance, when considering the HPD set and T(x) as the largest HPD set not containing the point-null value of the parameter, the corresponding loss function is

$L(\theta,\varphi,x) = \begin{cases}a\mathbb{I}_{T(x)^c}(\theta) &\text{when }\varphi=0\\ b+c\mathbb{I}_{T(x)}(\theta) &\text{when }\varphi=1\end{cases}$

parameterised by a,b,c. And depending on the HPD region.

Måns then introduces new loss functions that do not depend on x and still lead to either the symmetric or the one-sided credible intervals.as acceptance regions. However, one test actually has two different alternatives (Theorem 2), which makes it essentially a composition of two one-sided tests, while the other test returns the result to a one-sided test (Theorem 3), so even at this face-value level, I do not find the result that convincing. (For the one-sided test, George Casella and Roger Berger (1986) established links between Bayesian posterior probabilities and frequentist p-values.) Both Theorem 3 and the last result of the paper (Theorem 4) use a generic and set-free observation-free loss function (related to eqn. (5.2.1) in my book!, as quoted by the paper) but (and this is a big but) they only hold for prior distributions setting (prior) mass on both the null and the alternative. Otherwise, the solution is to always reject the hypothesis with the zero probability… This is actually an interesting argument on the why-are-credible-sets-unsuitable-for-testing debate, as it cannot bypass the introduction of a prior mass on Θ0!

Overall, I furthermore consider that a decision-theoretic approach to testing should encompass future steps rather than focussing on the reply to the (admittedly dumb) question is θ zero? Therefore, it must have both plan A and plan B at the ready, which means preparing (and using!) prior distributions under both hypotheses. Even on point-null hypotheses.

Now, after I wrote the above, I came upon a Stack Exchange page initiated by Måns last July. This is presumably not the first time a paper stems from Stack Exchange, but this is a fairly interesting outcome: thanks to the debate on his question, Måns managed to get a coherent manuscript written. Great! (In a sense, this reminded me of the polymath experiments of Terry Tao, Timothy Gower and others. Meaning that maybe most contributors could have become coauthors to the paper!)

## ASC 2012 (#1)

Posted in Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , on July 11, 2012 by xi'an

This morning I attended Alan Gelfand talk on directional data, i.e. on the torus (0,2π), and found his modeling via wrapped normals (i.e. normal reprojected onto the unit sphere) quite interesting and raising lots of probabilistic questions. For instance, usual moments like mean and variance had no meaning in this space. The variance matrix of the underlying normal, as well of its mean, obviously matter. One thing I am wondering about is how restrictive the normal assumption is. Because of the projection, any random change to the scale of the normal vector does not impact this wrapped normal distribution but there are certainly features that are not covered by this family. For instance, I suspect it can only offer at most two modes over the range (0,2π). And that it cannot be explosive at any point.

The keynote lecture this afternoon was delivered by Roderick Little in a highly entertaining way, about calibrated Bayesian inference in official statistics. For instance, he mentioned the inferential “schizophrenia” in this field due to the between design-based and model-based inferences. Although he did not define what he meant by “calibrated Bayesian” in the most explicit manner, he had this nice list of eight good reasons to be Bayesian (that came close to my own list at the end of the Bayesian Choice):

1. conceptual simplicity (Bayes is prescriptive, frequentism is not), “having a model is an advantage!”
2. avoiding ancillarity angst (Bayes conditions on everything)
3. avoiding confidence cons (confidence is not probability)
4. nails nuisance parameters (frequentists are either wrong or have a really hard time)
5. escapes from asymptotia
6. incorporates prior information and if not weak priors work fine
7. Bayes is useful (25 of the top 30 cited are statisticians out of which … are Bayesians)
8. Bayesians go to Valencia! [joke! Actually it should have been Bayesian go MCMskiing!]
9. Calibrated Bayes gets better frequentists answers

He however insisted that frequentists should be Bayesians and also that Bayesians should be frequentists, hence the calibration qualification.

After an interesting session on Bayesian statistics, with (adaptive or not) mixtures and variational Bayes tools, I actually joined the “young statistician dinner” (without any pretense at being a young statistician, obviously) and had interesting exchanges on a whole variety of topics, esp. as Kerrie Mengersen adopted (reinvented) my dinner table switch strategy (w/o my R simulated annealing code). Until jetlag caught up with me.