LMS Invited Lecture Series and CRISM Summer School in Computational Statistics, just started!

Warwick summer school on computational statistics [last call]

In case ‘Og’s readers are not aware, tomorrow, Monday 25 June, is the final day for registration in our incoming LMS/CRiSM summer school on computational statistics taking place at the University of Warwick, two weeks from now, 9-13 July, 2018. There is still room available till midday tomorrow. Greenwich Mean Time. And no later!

summer school on computational statistics [deadline]

Reminding ‘Og’s readers and others that the early bird registration deadline for our LMS/CRiSM summer school on computational statistics at the University of Warwick, 9-13 July, 2018 is next Thursday, March 01, 2018. This also applies for bursary applications, so do not dally and apply now!

the definitive summer school poster

A of A

Next June, at the same time as the ISBA meeting in Edinburgh, which is slowly taking shape, there will be an Analysis of Algorithms (AofA) meeting in Uppsala (Sweden) with Luc Devroye as the plenary Flajolet Award speaker. The full name of the conference is the 29th International Conference on Probabilistic, Combinatorial and Asymptotic Methods for the Analysis of Algorithms. While it is unfortunate the two conferences take place at the same time (and not in the same location), this also provides a continuity of conferences with the following week MCqMC in Rennes and the subsequent week summer school in simulation in Warwick (with Art Owen as the LMS Lecturer).

About our summer school, I want to point out that, thanks to several sponsors, we will be able to provide a consequent number of bursaries for junior researchers. This should be an additional incentive for attendees of the previous week Young Bayesian meeting (BAYSM) to remain the extra days nearby Warwick and attend this fantastic opportunity. Other instructors are Nicolas Chopin, Mark Huber and Jeff Rosenthal!

MCM 2017 snapshots [#2]

On the second day of MCM 2017, Emmanuel Gobet (from Polytechnique) gave the morning plenary talk on regression Monte Carlo methods, where he presented several ways of estimating conditional means of rv’s in nested problems where conditioning involves other conditional expectations. While interested in such problems in connection with ABC, I could not see how the techniques developed therein could apply to said problems.

By some of random chance, I ended up attending a hard-core random generation session where the speakers were discussing discrepancies between GNU library generators [I could not understand the target of interest and using MCMC till convergence seemed prone to false positives!], and failed statistical tests of some 64-bit Mersenne Twisters, and low discrepancy on-line subsamples of Uniform samples. Most exciting of all, Josef Leydold gave a talk on ratio-of-uniforms, on which I spent some time a while ago  (till ending up reinventing the wheel!), with highly refined cuts of the original box.

My own 180 slides [for a 50mn talk] somewhat worried my chairman, Art Owen, who kindly enquired the day before at the likelihood I could go through all 184 of them!!! I had appended the ABC convergence slides to an earlier set of slides on ABC with random forests in case of questions about that aspect, although I did not plan to go through those slides [and I mostly covered the 64 other slides] As the talk was in fine more about an inference method than a genuine Monte Carlo technique, plus involved random forests that sounded unfamiliar to many, I did not get many questions from the audience but had several deep discussions with people after the talk. Incidentally, we have just reposted our paper on ABC estimation via random forests, updated the abcrf R package, and submitted it to Peer Community in Evolutionary Biology!

optimal mixture weights in multiple importance sampling

Multiple importance sampling is back!!! I am always interested in this improvement upon regular importance sampling, even or especially after publishing a recent paper about our AMIS (for adaptive multiple importance sampling) algorithm, so I was quite eager to see what was in Hera He’s and Art Owen’s newly arXived paper. The paper is definitely exciting and set me on a new set of importance sampling improvements and experiments…

Some of the most interesting developments in the paper are that, (i) when using a collection of importance functions q_i with the same target p, every ratio q_i/p is a control variate function with expectation 1 [assuming each of the q_i‘s has a support smaller than the support of p]; (ii) the weights of a mixture of the q_i‘s can be chosen in an optimal way towards minimising the variance for a certain integrand; (iii) multiple importance sampling incorporates quite naturally stratified sampling, i.e. the q_i‘s may have disjoint supports; )iv) control variates contribute little, esp. when compared with the optimisation over the weights [which does not surprise me that much, given that the control variates have little correlation with the integrands]; (v) Veach’s (1997) seminal PhD thesis remains a driving force behind those results [and in getting Eric Veach an Academy Oscar in 2014!].

One extension that I would find of the uttermost interest deals with unscaled densities, both for p and the q_i‘s. In that case, the weights do not even sum up to a know value and I wonder at how much more difficult it is to analyse this realistic case. And unscaled densities led me to imagine using geometric mixtures instead. Or even harmonic mixtures! (Maybe not.)

Another one is more in tune with our adaptive multiple mixture paper. The paper works with regret, but one could also work with remorse! Besides the pun, this means that one could adapt the weights along iterations and even possible design new importance functions from the past outcome, i.e., be adaptive once again. He and Owen suggest mixing their approach with our adaptive sequential Monte Carlo model.