IMS workshop [day 5]

The last day of the starting workshop [and my last day in Singapore] was a day of importance [sampling] with talks by Matti Vihola opposing importance sampling and delayed acceptance and particle MCMC, related to several papers of his that I missed. To be continued in the coming weeks at the IMS, which is another reason to regret having to leave that early [as my Parisian semester starts this Monday with an undergrad class at 8:30!]

And then a talk by Joaquín Miguez on stabilizing importance sampling by truncation which reminded me very much of the later work by Andrew Gelman and Aki Vehtari on Pareto smoothed importance sampling, with further operators adapted to sequential settings and the similar drawback that when the importance sampler is poor, i.e., when the simulated points are all very far from the centre of mass, no amount of fudging with the weights will bring the points closer. AMIS made an appearance as a reference method, to be improved by this truncation of the weights, a wee bit surprising as it should bring the large weights of the earlier stages down.

Followed by an almost silent talk by Nick Whiteley, who having lost his voice to the air conditioning whispered his talk in the microphone. Having once faced a lost voice during an introductory lecture to a large undergraduate audience, I could not but completely commiserate for the hardship of the task. Although this made the audience most silent and attentive. His topic was the Viterbi process and its parallelisation, by using a truncated horizon (presenting connection with overdamped Langevin, eg Durmus and Moulines and Dalalyan).

And due to a pressing appointment with my son and his girlfriend [who were traveling through Singapore on that day] for a chili crab dinner on my way to the airport, I missed the final talk by Arnaud Doucet, where he was to reconsider PDMP algorithms without the continuous time layer, a perspective I find most appealing!

Overall, this was a quite diverse and rich [starting] seminar, backed by the superb organisation of the IMS and the smooth living conditions on the NUS campus [once I had mastered the bus routes], which would have made much more sense for me as part of a longer stay, which is actually what happened the previous time I visited the IMS (in 2005), again clashing with my course schedule at home… And as always, I am impressed with the city-state of Singapore, for the highly diverse food scene in particular, but also this [maybe illusory] impression of coexistence between communities. And even though the ecological footprint could certainly be decreased, measures to curb car ownership (with a 150% purchase tax) and use (with congestion charges).