ABC webinar, first!

The première of the ABC World Seminar last Thursday was most successful! It took place at the scheduled time, with no technical interruption and allowed 130⁺ participants from most of the World [sorry, West Coast friends!] to listen to the first speaker, Dennis Prangle,  presenting normalising flows and distilled importance sampling. And to answer questions. As I had already commented on the earlier version of his paper, I will not reproduce them here. In short, I remain uncertain, albeit not skeptical, about the notions of normalising flows and variational encoders for estimating densities, when perceived as a non-parametric estimator due to the large number of parameters it involves and wonder at the availability of convergence rates. Incidentally, I had forgotten at the remarkable link between KL distance & importance sampling variability. Adding to the to-read list Müller et al. (2018) on neural importance sampling.