reis naar Amsterdam

On Monday, I went to Amsterdam to give a seminar at the University of Amsterdam, in the department of psychology. And to visit Eric-Jan Wagenmakers and his group there. And I had a fantastic time! I talked about our mixture proposal for Bayesian testing and model choice without getting hostile or adverse reactions from the audience, quite the opposite as we later discussed this new notion for several hours in the café across the street. I also had the opportunity to meet with Peter Grünwald [who authored a book on the minimum description length principle] pointed out a minor inconsistency of the common parameter approach, namely that the Jeffreys prior on the first model did not have to coincide with the Jeffreys prior on the second model. (The Jeffreys prior for the mixture being unavailable.) He also wondered about a more conservative property of the approach, compared with the Bayes factor, in the sense that the non-null parameter could get closer to the null-parameter while still being identifiable.

Among the many persons I met in the department, Maarten Marsman talked to me about his thesis research, Plausible values in statistical inference, which involved handling the Ising model [a non-sparse Ising model with O(p²) parameters] by an auxiliary representation due to Marc Kac and getting rid of the normalising (partition) constant by the way. (Warning, some approximations involved!) And who showed me a simple probit example of the Gibbs sampler getting stuck as the sample size n grows. Simply because the uniform conditional distribution on the parameter concentrates faster (in 1/n) than the posterior (in 1/√n). This does not come as a complete surprise as data augmentation operates in an n-dimensional space. Hence it requires more time to get around. As a side remark [still worth printing!], Maarten dedicated his thesis as “To my favourite random variables , Siem en Fem, and to my normalizing constant, Esther”, from which I hope you can spot the influence of at least two of my book dedications! As I left Amsterdam on Tuesday, I had time for a enjoyable dinner with E-J’s group, an equally enjoyable early morning run [with perfect skies for sunrise pictures!], and more discussions in the department. Including a presentation of the new (delicious?!) Bayesian software developed there, JASP, which aims at non-specialists [i.e., researchers unable to code in R, BUGS, or, God forbid!, STAN] And about the consequences of mixture testing in some psychological experiments. Once again, a fantastic time discussing Bayesian statistics and their applications, with a group of dedicated and enthusiastic Bayesians!