MCMskv #1 [room with a view]

That’s it!, MCMskv has now started! We hold our round-table Monday night, which ended with most of my interventions revolving about the importance of models. And of the fact that models are always approximate (and wrong), hence that uncertainty and uncertainty ascertainment is paramount. Even more with large datasets and high-dimensional models. Apologies to the audience if I sounded like running on a very short loop. (And maybe also for the round-table to keep them from their dinner!)  Still, I got some items for reflection out of this discussion, including the notion that big data is usually and inappropriately associated with an impression of completeness that is almost deterministic in a Laplacian sense. Namely that the available data for, say, all Facebook users, seems to allow us (or The Machine) to play Laplace’s Demon. And thus forgoes the need for uncertainty and uncertainty ascertainment. Which obviously clashes with the issues of poor data, inappropriate models, and time or space stationarity of the available information.

Two more computing-related notions that came out the discussion [for me] are asynchronicity (in the sense explored by Terenin et al. a few months ago) and subsampling, The later seems to mean many things, judging from the discussion from the panel and the audience. For me, it corresponded to the ability (or inability) to handle only part of the available data to simulate the posterior associated with this available data.

The first talk on Tuesday morning was the plenary talk by Michael Jordan about his incorporation of complexity constraints on the convergence of an MCMC variable selection algorithm. (I though I had commented this paper in the past on the ‘Og but apparently I did not!) This was quite interesting, with ultra-fast convergence of the sampler. The talk was alas made harder to follow because of a cameraman standing in front of most of the audience for the entire time, as in the above picture. (I also noticed the interesting randomness of the light panels, who all display different patterns of dots, maybe random enough to satisfy a randomness test!) Another if irrelevant annoying fact was that I discovered upon arrival that my airbnb rental was located 8 kilometres away from the conference location, in a completely different town! Thankfully, we had rented a car [for 5] which saved the day (and even more the night!).