O’Bayes 2015 [day #2]

This morning was the most special time of the conference in that we celebrated Susie Bayarri‘s contributions and life together with members of her family. Jim gave a great introduction that went over Susie’s numerous papers and the impact they had in Statistics and outside Statistics. As well as her recognised (and unsurprising if you knew her) expertise in wine and food! The three talks in that morning were covering some of the domains within Susie’s fundamental contributions and delivered by former students of her: model assessment through various types of predictive p-values by Maria Eugenia Castellanos, Bayesian model selection by Anabel Forte, and computer models by Rui Paulo, all talks that translated quite accurately the extent of Susie’s contributions… In a very nice initiative, the organisers had also set a wine tasting break (at 10am!) around two vintages that Susie had reviewed in the past years [with reviews to show up soon in the Wines section of the ‘Og!]

The talks of the afternoon session were by Jean-Bernard (JB) Salomond about a new proposal to handle embedded hypotheses in a non-parametric framework and by James Scott about false discovery rates for neuroimaging. Despite the severe theoretical framework behind the proposal, JB managed a superb presentation that mostly focussed on the intuition for using the smoothed (or approximative) version of the null hypothesis. (A flavour of ABC, somehow?!) Also kudos to JB for perpetuating my tradition of starting sections with unrelated pictures. James’ topic was more practical Bayes or pragmatic Bayes than objective Bayes in that he analysed a large fMRI experiment on spatial working memory, introducing a spatial pattern that led to a complex penalised Lasso-like optimisation. The data was actually an fMRI of the brain of Russell Poldrack, one of James’ coauthors on that paper.

The (sole) poster session was on the evening with a diverse range of exciting topics—including three where I was a co-author, by Clara Grazian, Kaniav Kamary, and Kerrie Mengersen—but it was alas too short or I was alas too slow to complete the tour before it ended! In retrospect we could have broken it into two sessions since Wednesday evening is a free evening.