reading classics (#1)

Here we are, back in a new school year and with new students reading the classics. Today, Ilaria Masiani started the seminar with a presentation of Spiegelhalter et al. 2002 DIC paper, already heavily mentioned on this blog. Here are the slides, posted on slideshare (if you know of another website housing and displaying slides, let me know: the incompatibility between Firefox and slideshare drives me crazy!, well, almost…)

I have already said a lot about DIC on this blog so will not add a repetition of my reservations. I enjoyed the link with the log scores and the Kullback-Leibler divergence, but failed to see a proper intuition for defining the effective number of parameters the way it is defined in the paper… The presentation was quite faithful to the original and, as is usual in the reading seminars (esp. the first one of the year), did not go far enough (for my taste) in the critical evaluation of the themes therein. Maybe an idea for next year would be to ask one of my PhD students to give the zeroth seminar…