Bayes 250 in Durham

Reproducing an email from ISBA (sorry about the confusion purposely created by the title, this is Durham, North Carolina, not Durham, England, just as the London in Bayes 250 in London was London, England, not London, Ontario!):

ISBA announces a special celebration of the 250th anniversary of the presentation (December 23, 1763) of Thomas Bayes’ seminal paper “An Essay towards solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances” that will be held at Duke University in conjunction with the O-Bayes 13 Workshop (December 15-19) and EFab@ Bayes250 Workshop (December 15-17). (I am part of the scientific committee for O-Bayes 13!)

Speakers for the anniversary celebration are legendary contributors to the Bayesian literature, spanning a range of fields:

• Stephen Fienberg, Carnegie-Mellon University
• Michael Jordan, University of California, Berkeley
• Christopher Sims, Princeton University
• Adrian Smith, University of London
• Stephen Stigler, University of Chicago

There will be a banquet in the evening, with a speech by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne, noted author of the popular book “The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes’ Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines and Emerged Triumphant From Two Centuries of Controversy.”

Bayes 250 in London

The two-day Bayes 250 Conference at the Royal Statistical Society is now officially announced with the complete programme on the RSS website. With the registration form available as well. A mix of eighteen junior and senior speakers covering the thematic and geographical spectra of UK Bayesian statistics. (It would be difficult not to acknowledge the top position of the United Kingdom in the list of contributions to Bayesian statistics!) Plus an interview of Dennis Lindley (pictured above in one of the rare pictures of Dennis available on the Web) by Tony O’Hagan! Thanks to Chris Holmes for organising this exciting meeting celebrating the 1763 publication of the Essay (with me “tagging along” as a co-organiser).

Here is a blurb I wrote as a presentation (pardon my French!):

2013 marks the 250th anniversary of the publication in Dec. 1763 of “An Essay towards solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances” in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, based on notes by Thomas Bayes and edited by Richard Price who submitted the Essay posthumously to Bayes’ death.

This publication is acknowledged as the birth certificate of what is now called Bayesian statistics and the Royal Statistical Society decided to celebrate this important milestone in the story of statistics (and not only UK statistics) by organising a conference on Bayesian statistics. The conference will take place at the RSS Headquarters in Errol Street and will run from June 19, late morning, to June 20, early afternoon. Everyone interested is welcome to present one’s work during the poster session on the afternoon of June 19.

The Royal Statistical Society is looking forward your participation in this event and hopes you will enjoy the variety in the presentations of the programme.

abstract for “Bayes’ Theorem: then and now”

Here is my abstract for the invited talk I will give at EMS 2013 in Budapest this summer (the first two banners were sites of EMS 2013 conferences as well, which came above the European Meeting of Statisticians on a Google search for EMS 2013):

What is now called Bayes’ Theorem was published and maybe mostly written by Richard Price in 1763, 250 ago. It was re-discovered independently (?) in 1773 by Pierre Laplace, who put it to good use for solving statistical problems, launching what was then called inverse probability and now goes under the name of Bayesian statistics. The talk will cover some historical developments of Bayesian statistics, focussing on the controversies and disputes that marked and stil mark its evolution over those 250 years, up to now. It will in particular address some arguments about prior distributions made by John Maynard Keynes and Harold Jeffreys, as well as divergences about the nature of testing by Dennis Lindley, James Berger, and current science philosophers like Deborah Mayo and Aris Spanos, and misunderstandings on Bayesian computational issues, including those about approximate Bayesian computations (ABC).

I was kindly asked by the scientific committee of EMS 2013 to give a talk on Bayes’ theorem: then and now, which suited me very well for several reasons: first, I was quite interested in giving an historical overview, capitalising on earlier papers about Jeffreys‘ and Keynes‘ books, my current re-analysis of the Jeffreys-Lindley’s paradox, and exchanges around the nature of Bayesian inference. (As you may guess from the contents of the abstract, even borrowing from the article about Price in Significance!) Second, the quality of the programme is definitely justifying attending the whole conference. And not only for meeting again with many friends. At last, I have never visited Hungary and this is a perfect opportunity for starting my summer break there!

Price’s theorem?

A very interesting article by Martyn Hooper in Significance Feb. 2013 issue I just received. (It is available on-line for free.) It raises the question as to how much exactly Price contributed to the famous Essay… Given the percentage of the Essay that can be attributed to Price with certainty (Bayes’ part stops at page 14 out of 32 pages), given the lack of the original manuscript by Bayes, given the delay between the composition of this original manuscript (1755?), its delivery to Price (1761?) and its publication in 1763, given the absence of any other document published by Bayes on the topic, I tend to concur with Martyn Hooper (and Sharon McGrayne) that Price contributed quite significantly to the 1763 paper. Of course, it would sound quite bizarre to start calling our approach to Statistics Pricean or Pricey (or even Priceless!) Statistics, but this may constitute one of the most striking examples of Stigler’s Law of Eponymy!

Bayes 2013

Among the many Bayes.250 meetings this year—including one at the Royal Statistical Society on June 19 and 20 I am co-organising with Chris Holmes—I just became aware of another Bayes 2013 meeting organised in Rotterdam by Emmanuel Lesaffre (I was going to write the ISBA Section on Biostatistics and Pharmaceutical Statistics but could not find a link on the webpage to a sponsorship of the section). Nice visual too! This could be an interesting start to a European tour of meetings in May and June, followed with the French statistical meeting in Toulouse, ABC in Rome, the Bayesian young statistician meeting in Milano, the 9th Conference on Bayesian Nonparametrics in Amsterdam, and then Bayes.250 at the RSS on June 19-20!