ACS 2012 (#2)

This morning, after a nice and cool run along the river Torrens amidst almost unceasing bird songs, I attended another Bayesian ASC 2012 session with Scott Sisson presenting a simulation method aimed at correcting for biased confidence intervals and Robert Kohn giving the same talk in Kyoto. Scott’s proposal, which is rather similar to parametric bootstrap bias correction, is actually more frequentist than Bayesian as the bias is defined in terms of an correct frequentist coverage of a given confidence (or credible) interval. (Thus making the connection with Roderick Little’s calibrated Bayes talk of yesterday.) This perspective thus perceives ABC as a particular inferential method, instead of a computational approximation to the genuine Bayesian object. (We will certainly discuss the issue with Scott next week in Sydney.)

Then Peter Donnely gave a particularly exciting and well-attended talk on the geographic classification of humans, in particular of the (early 1900’s) population of the British isles, based on a clever clustering idea derived from an earlier paper of Na Li and Matthew Stephens: using genetic sequences from a group of individuals, each individual was paired with the rest of the sample as if it descended from this population. Using an HMM model, this led to clustering the sample into about 50 groups, with a remarkable geographic homogeneity: for instance, Cornwall and Devon made two distinct groups, an English speaking pocket of Wales (Little England) was identified as a specific group and so on, the central, eastern and southern England constituting an homogenous group of its own…