the Hyvärinen score is back

Stéphane Shao, Pierre Jacob and co-authors from Harvard have just posted on arXiv a new paper on Bayesian model comparison using the Hyvärinen score which thus uses the Laplacian as a natural and normalisation-free penalisation for the score test. (Score that I first met in Padova, a few weeks before moving from X to IX.) […]

Barbie’s Z scores

I came upon this terrible (pink) graph the other day, that was composed by Rehabs.com to point out the physiological extremes of a Barbie doll (along with the possibly fatal impact this “ideal” may have on young girls). As for the many statistical flaws of that graphs, pick your favourite between turning the control group […]

CORE talk at Louvain-la-Neuve

Tomorrow, I will give a talk at the seminar for econometrics and finance of CORE, in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. Here are my slides, recycled from several earlier talks and from Judith’s slides in Banff:  

ABC with composite score functions

My friends Erlis Ruli, Nicola Sartori and Laura Ventura from Università degli Studi de Padova have just arXived a new paper entitled Approximate Bayesian Computation with composite score functions. While the paper provides a survey of composite likelihood methods, the core idea of the paper is to use the score function (of the composite likelihood) […]

Lindley’s paradox(es) and scores

“In the asymptotic limit, the Bayesian cannot justify the strictly positive probability of H0 as an approximation to testing the hypothesis that the parameter value is close to θ0 — which is the hypothesis of real scientific interest” While revising my Jeffreys-Lindley’s paradox paper for Philosophy of Science, it was suggested (to me) that I […]