¼th i-like workshop in St. Anne’s College, Oxford

Due to my previous travelling to and from Nottingham for the seminar and back home early enough to avoid the dreary evening trains from Roissy airport (no luck there, even at 8pm, the RER train was not operating efficiently!, and no fast lane is planed prior to 2023…), I did not see many talks at the i-like workshop. About ¼th, roughly… I even missed the poster session (and the most attractive title of Lazy ABC by Dennis Prangle) thanks to another dreary train ride from Derby to Oxford.

As it happened I had already heard or read parts of the talks in the Friday morning session, but this made understanding them better. As in Banff, Paul Fearnhead‘s talk on reparameterisations for pMCMC on hidden Markov models opened a wide door to possible experiments on those algorithms. The examples in the talk were mostly of the parameter duplication type, somewhat creating unidentifiability to decrease correlation, but I also wondered at the possibility of introducing frequent replicas of the hidden chain in order to fight degeneracy. Then Sumeet Singh gave a talk on the convergence properties of noisy ABC for approximate MLE. Although I had read some of the papers behind the talk, it made me realise how keeping balls around each observation in the ABC acceptance step was not leading to extinction as the number of observations increased. (Summet also had a good line with his ABCDE algorithm, standing for ABC done exactly!) Anthony Lee covered his joint work with Krys Łatuszyński on the ergodicity conditions on the ABC-MCMC algorithm, the only positive case being the 1-hit algorithm as discussed in an earlier post. This result will hopefully get more publicity, as I frequently read that increasing the number of pseudo-samples has no clear impact on the ABC approximation. Krys Łatuszyński concluded the morning with an aggregate of the various results he and his co-authors had obtained on the fascinating Bernoulli factory. Including constructive derivations.

After a few discussions on and around research topics, it was too soon time to take advantage of the grand finale of a March shower to walk from St. Anne’s College to Oxford Station, in order to start the trip back home. I was lucky enough to find a seat and could start experimenting in R the new idea my trip to Nottingham had raised! While discussing a wee bit with my neighbour, a delightful old lady from the New Forest travelling to Coventry, recovering from a brain seizure, wondering about my LaTeX code syntax despite the tiny fonts, and who most suddenly popped a small screen from her bag to start playing Candy Crush!, apologizing all the same. The overall trip was just long enough for my R code to validate this idea of mine, making this week in England quite a profitable one!!!