Snapshots from CRiSM workshop

The workshop is a mix of theory, methodology, computational techniques and applications that makes it quite exciting. Although I already gave several versions of my talk in the past year, I still got interesting feedback, in particular a connection between our Savage-Dickey representation and bridge sampling. Among the interesting talks I attended, a few snapshots; both Jim Berger and Dongchu Sun presented new closed form expressions for effective numbers of parameters in complex linear models, Antonio Lijoi covered some mathematics of species estimation models [with some possible connections with Geoff Nicholls’  earlier talk on language classification], Chris Holmes exposed the advances he had made since Edinburgh (at least for those of us who attended both meetings), highlighting an interesting link with LDA, both Chris and Matthew Stephens considering direction selection for discrimination and clustering, Peter Müller talked about the analysis of a genetic pathway model represented as a graph, Robert Kohn zoomed through an adaptive particle MCMC algorithm where the likelihood was estimated (with the interesting side comment that what looks as an unbiased estimator from one perspective is also an auxiliary joint likelihood from another perspective) and David Spiegelhalter gave a both hilarious and thought-provoking talk on the “deeper uncertainty” that surrounds statistical models.