day of the theses

Today, I will spend my day in thesis defenses, as I take part in a defense committee this morning at Supéléc, about a thesis written by Alireza Roodaki on a new approach to trans-dimensional MCMC for mixtures of distributions. Rather than a new way to simulate from posterior distributions with a varying number of components, the thesis concentrates on the post-simulation processing of the outcome of the simulation, constructing an object similar to the point process representation of Matthew Stephens where components have a meaning across varying dimensions. An interesting and novel perspective. The afternoon, I am part of another defense committee for the habilitation of Fadoua Balabdaoui, my colleague in Paris-Dauphine. Fadoua is working in non-parametric statistics, under shape constraints, but has a wide range of interests and publications that fully justify an habilitation degree at this stage of her career. (Habilitation is a degree required in France and Germany to become a Full Professor and to autonomously advise PhD students.)