MCMSki IV [day 3]

Already on the final day..! And still this frustration in being unable to attend three sessions at once… Andrew Gelman started the day with a non-computational talk that broached on themes that are familiar to readers of his blog, on the misuse of significance tests and on recommendations for better practice. I then picked the Scaling and optimisation of MCMC algorithms session organised by Gareth Roberts, with optimal scaling talks by Tony Lelièvre, Alex Théry and Chris Sherlock, while Jochen Voss spoke about the convergence rate of ABC, a paper I already discussed on the blog. A fairly exciting session showing that MCMC’ory (name of a workshop I ran in Paris in the late 90’s!) is still well and alive!

After the break (sadly without the ski race!), the software round-table session was something I was looking for. The four softwares covered by this round-table were BUGS, JAGS, STAN, and BiiPS, each presented according to the same pattern. I would have like to see a “battle of the bands”, illustrating pros & cons for each language on a couple of models & datasets. STAN got the officious prize for cool tee-shirts (we should have asked the STAN team for poster prize tee-shirts). And I had to skip the final session for a flu-related doctor appointment…

I called for a BayesComp meeting at 7:30, hoping for current and future members to show up and discuss the format of the future MCMski meetings, maybe even proposing new locations on other “sides of the Italian Alps”! But (workshop fatigue syndrome?!), no-one showed up. So anyone interested in discussing this issue is welcome to contact me or David van Dyk, the new BayesComp program chair.