3rd Rimini Bayesian workshop

I have (recklessly) agreed to take part in a debate at the third Rimini Bayesian econometrics workshop, taking place at the Rimini Center for Economic Analysis next July 1 and 2. The theme of the debate is “The 21st Century Belongs to Bayes”, which sounds a wee too religious to my taste!, and I will argue about this with Russell Davison, both from McGill and GREQAM in Marseilles. I hope this won’t turn into a disaster as I am not particularly gifted at debating and even less at preaching. Here are the preliminary slides I drafted yesterday

recycling slides from my model choice talk as well as from my master course on The Bayesian Choice. The main input at this stage is the insertion of quotes from recent papers by Andrew Gelman and Alan Templeton, as well as from the discussions of the former by José Bernardo, Stephen Senn, and Larry Wasserman. The quotes from Andrew may sound apocryphal but they come from his April Fool 2008 post (and then Bayesian Analysis paper) where he covers some of the anti-Bayesian arguments. My reasoning in pilling in all those quotes is to douse the most standard criticisms from the start, with a tongue-in-cheek attitude since I completely agree with the first quote from Andrew. However, this most likely means that Russell will look elsewhere for arguments against a 21st Bayesian century. I can actually predict with a 87% prior probability that one such argument will be about large dimensional models, which is another standard criticism addressed at the Bayesian methodology.