## art brut [no!]

Posted in pictures, Statistics, Travel with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 27, 2019 by xi'an

## ENSEA & CISEA 2019

Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , on June 26, 2019 by xi'an

I found my (short) trip to Abdijan for the CISEA 2019 conference quite fantastic as it allowed me to meet with old friends, from the earliest days at CREST and even before, and to meet new ones. Including local students of ENSEA who had taken a Bayesian course out of my Bayesian Choice book. And who had questions about the nature of priors and the difficulty they had in accepting that several replies were possible with the same data! I wish I had had more time to discuss the relativity of Bayesian statements with them but this was a great and rare opportunity to find avid readers of my books! I also had a long chat with another student worried about the use or mis-use of reversible jump algorithms to draw inference  on time-series models in Bayesian Essentials, chat that actually demonstrated his perfect understanding of the matter. And it was fabulous to meet so many statisticians and econometricians from West Africa, most of them French-speaking. My only regret is not having any free time to visit Abidjan or the neighbourhood as the schedule of the conference did not allow for it [or even for a timely posting of a post!], especially as it regularly ran overtime. (But it did provide for a wide range of new local dishes that I definitely enjoyed tasting!) We are now discussing further opportunities to visit there, e.g. by teaching a short course at the Master or PhD levels.

## Bayesian conjugate gradients [open for discussion]

Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , on June 25, 2019 by xi'an

When fishing for an illustration for this post on Google, I came upon this Bayesian methods for hackers cover, a book about which I have no clue whatsoever (!) but that mentions probabilistic programming. Which serves as a perfect (?!) introduction to the call for discussion in Bayesian Analysis of the incoming Bayesian conjugate gradient method by Jon Cockayne, Chris Oates (formerly Warwick), Ilse Ipsen and Mark Girolami (still partially Warwick!). Since indeed the paper is about probabilistic numerics à la Mark and co-authors. Surprisingly dealing with solving the deterministic equation Ax=b by Bayesian methods. The method produces a posterior distribution on the solution x⁰, given a fixed computing effort, which makes it pertain to the anytime algorithms. It also relates to an earlier 2015 paper by Christian Hennig where the posterior is on A⁻¹ rather than x⁰ (which is quite a surprising if valid approach to the problem!) The computing effort is translated here in computations of projections of random projections of Ax, which can be made compatible with conjugate gradient steps. Interestingly, the choice of the prior on x is quite important, including setting a low or high convergence rate…  Deadline is August 04!

## efficient MCMC sampling

Posted in Statistics with tags , , , on June 24, 2019 by xi'an

Maxime Vono, Daniel Paulin and Arnaud Doucet recently arXived a paper about a regularisation technique that allows for efficient sampling from a complex posterior which potential function factorises as a large sum of transforms of linear projections of the parameter θ

$U(\theta)=\sum_i U_i(A_i\theta)$

The central idea in the paper [which was new to me] is to introduce auxiliary variates for the different terms in the sum, replacing the projections in the transforms, with an additional regularisation forcing these auxiliary variates to be as close as possible from the corresponding projection

$U(\theta,\mathbf z)=\sum_i U_i(z_i)+\varrho^{-1}||z_i-A_i\theta||^2$

This is only an approximation to the true target but it enjoys the possibility to run a massive Gibbs sampler in quite a reduced dimension. As the variance ρ of the regularisation term goes to zero the marginal posterior on the parameter θ converges to the true posterior. The authors manage to achieve precise convergence rates both in total variation and in Wasserstein distance.

From a practical point of view, only judging from the logistic example, it is hard to fathom how much this approach improves upon other approaches (provided they still apply) as the impact of the value of ρ should be assessed on top of the convergence of the high-dimensional Gibbs sampler. Or is there an annealing version in the pipe-line? While parallelisation is a major argument, it also seems that the Gibbs sampler need a central monitoring for each new simulation of θ. Unless some asynchronous version can be implemented.

## sampling and imbalanced

Posted in Statistics with tags , , , , , on June 21, 2019 by xi'an

Deborshee Sen, Matthias Sachs, Jianfeng Lu and David Dunson have recently arXived a sub-sampling paper for  classification (logistic) models where some covariates or some responses are imbalanced. With a PDMP, namely zig-zag, used towards preserving the correct invariant distribution (as already mentioned in an earlier post on the zig-zag zampler and in a recent Annals paper by Joris Bierkens, Paul Fearnhead, and Gareth Roberts (Warwick)). The current paper is thus an improvement on the above. Using (non-uniform) importance sub-sampling across observations and simpler upper bounds for the Poisson process. A rather practical form of Poisson thinning. And proposing unbiased estimates of the sub-sample log-posterior as well as stratified sub-sampling.

I idly wondered if the zig-zag sampler could itself be improved by not switching the bouncing directions at random since directions associated with almost certainly null coefficients should be neglected as much as possible, but the intensity functions associated with the directions do incorporate this feature. Except for requiring computation of the intensities for all directions. This is especially true when facing many covariates.

Thinking of the logistic regression model itself, it is sort of frustrating that something so close to an exponential family causes so many headaches! Formally, it is an exponential family but the normalising constant is rather unwieldy, especially when there are many observations and many covariates. The Polya-Gamma completion is a way around, but it proves highly costly when the dimension is large…

## Domaine Vaquer [côtes du Roussillon]

Posted in Statistics with tags , , , , , , , , , on June 20, 2019 by xi'an

## delayed but published!

Posted in Statistics with tags , , , , , , on June 20, 2019 by xi'an