Archive for the Travel Category
at the centre of Bayes
Posted in Mountains, pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags 2019 Education Buildings Scotland Awards, Arthur's Seat, Bayes Café, Bayes Centre, Brown University, ECERM, Edinburgh, Holyrood Park, ICMS, jatp, Maxwell Institute Colloquium, Maxwell Institute Graduate School, Scotland, Scottish sun, seminar, Thomas Bayes, University of Edinburgh on October 14, 2019 by xi'an
2:14:04!!!
Posted in Running, Statistics, Travel with tags Brigid Kosgei, Kenya, marathon, Nike Next%, Paula Radcliffe, World record on October 13, 2019 by xi'an
1:59:40!
Posted in pictures, Running, Travel with tags Austria, Eliud Kipchoge, Kenya, marathon, pacemakers, sub-two-hours marathon, unofficial record, Vienna, Wien, Wiener Prater on October 12, 2019 by xi'an
Japanese mushrooms [jatp]
Posted in Mountains, pictures, Running, Travel with tags hiking, Japan, jatp, Kii peninsula, Koyasan Forest Park, Kumano Kodō, mushrooms, Wakayama prefecture on October 12, 2019 by xi'an
and it only gets worse [verbatim]
Posted in Travel with tags America, baby Trump, cliffs, Donald Trump, Dover cliffs, Greenland, gun control, impeachement, Kurdistan, Together Against Trump, Turkey, Ukraine, US politics, US presidents on October 11, 2019 by xi'an
“[DT] is a racist and he stokes racism in this country, and it does not just offend our sensibilities, it fundamentally changes the character of this country and it leads to violence.” Beto O’Rourke, 4 August
“I am the chosen one, somebody had to do it.” DT, 08/21
““Essentially [Greenland] it’s a large real estate deal. A lot of things can be done.” DT, 08/18
“They start forming off the coast of Africa, as they’re moving across the Atlantic, we drop a bomb inside the eye of the hurricane and it disrupts it. Why can’t we do that?” DT, 08/25
“If that perfect phone call with the President of Ukraine isn’t considered appropriate, then no future President can EVER again speak to another foreign leader!” DT, 09/27
“As I have stated strongly before, and just to reiterate, if Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I’ve done before!).” DT 10/07
“[The Kurds] didn’t help us in the second world war, they didn’t help us with Normandy.” DT 10/10
if you are looking for me today…
Posted in Kids, pictures, Travel, University life with tags Erasmus, exchange student, maths department, MIDO, Université Paris Dauphine on October 1, 2019 by xi'an
from here to infinity
Posted in Books, Statistics, Travel with tags Bayesian inference, classification, Clermont-Ferrand, clustering, Dirichlet process mixture, From Here to Infinity, hyperparameter, Ian Stewart, label switching, mixtures of distributions, prior distributions, sparse finite mixtures, University of Warwick, Vienna on September 30, 2019 by xi'an“Introducing a sparsity prior avoids overfitting the number of clusters not only for finite mixtures, but also (somewhat unexpectedly) for Dirichlet process mixtures which are known to overfit the number of clusters.”
On my way back from Clermont-Ferrand, in an old train that reminded me of my previous ride on that line that took place in… 1975!, I read a fairly interesting paper published in Advances in Data Analysis and Classification by [my Viennese friends] Sylvia Früwirth-Schnatter and Gertrud Malsiner-Walli, where they describe how sparse finite mixtures and Dirichlet process mixtures can achieve similar results when clustering a given dataset. Provided the hyperparameters in both approaches are calibrated accordingly. In both cases these hyperparameters (scale of the Dirichlet process mixture versus scale of the Dirichlet prior on the weights) are endowed with Gamma priors, both depending on the number of components in the finite mixture. Another interesting feature of the paper is to witness how close the related MCMC algorithms are when exploiting the stick-breaking representation of the Dirichlet process mixture. With a resolution of the label switching difficulties via a point process representation and k-mean clustering in the parameter space. [The title of the paper is inspired from Ian Stewart’s book.]
