O’Bayes 2019 conference program

The full and definitive program of the O’Bayes 2019 conference in Warwick is now on line. Including discussants for all papers. And the three [and free] tutorials on Friday afternoon, 28 June, on model selection (M. Barbieri), MCMC recent advances (G.O. Roberts) and BART (E.I. George). Registration remains open at the reduced rate and submissions of posters can still be sent to me for all conference participants.

Bayes on the Beach

This year, the now traditional Bayes on the Beach conference will take place in Surfers Paradise (Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia) on 25th – 27th November. The conference provides a forum for discussion on developments and applications of Bayesian statistics, and includes keynote presentations, tutorials, practical problem-based workshops, invited oral presentations, and poster presentations. The keynote speakers are Nial Friel, Renate Meyer, Antonietta Mira, and Sudipto Banerjee, Registration is open.

phishing alert at CIRM!

A strong and loud warning to all participants to one of the three events organised in CIRM, Luminy, Marseilles, in conjunction with Kerrie Mengersen’s Jean Morlet visiting chair, namely that some participants have received calls from crooks posting as CIRM admins, asking for credit card details towards supporting their stay at CIRM. This is a phishing attempt as self-supported participants to these events will be asked to pay at the end of their stay and never by phone or mail. In the meanwhile, there remains a few entries for both

1. Bayesian Statistics in the Big Data Era (26-30 Nov, 2018)
   
2. Young Bayesians and Big Data for Social Good (23-26 Nov., 2018)
   

for which registration is free but compulsory.

ISBA 2018 provisional program is now on!

The program of the incoming 2018 ISBA World Meeting in Edinburgh, Scotland, is now on line. Predicting a fairly intense week, from 9am till 7pm, with five parallel sessions at time, and a fairly dense poster session list from 20:30 till 23:00. (The Objective Bayes session I helped organise will take place on the Wednesday morn.)

another instance of a summer of Bayesian conferences

As it happens, the next MaxEnt conference will happens in London, on 2-6 July, at the Alan Turing Institute, which makes it another perfect continuation of the ISBA meeting in Edinburgh, or of the Computational Statistics summer school in Warwick the week after. But in competition with BAYsm in Warwick and MCqMC in Rennes. I once attended a MaxEnt meeting in Oxford. (Oxford, Mississippi!) Which was quite interesting in the audience it attracted and the focus of the discussions, some of which were exhilaratingly philosophical!

StanCon in Helsinki [29-31 Aug 2018]

As emailed to me by Aki Vehtari, the next StanCon will take place this summer in the wonderful city of Helsinki, at the end of August. On Aalto University Töölö Campus precisely. The list of speakers and tutorial teachers is available on the webpage. (The only “negative point” is that the conference does not include a Tuesday, the night of the transcendence 2 miles race!) Somewhat concluding this never-ending summer of Bayesian conferences!

ISBA 2016

I remember fondly the early Valencia meetings where we did not have to pick between sessions. Then one year there were two sessions and soon more. And we now have to pick among equally tantalising sessions. [Complaint of the super wealthy, I do realise.] After a morning trip to San’Antioco and the southern coast of Sardinia, I started my ISBA 2016 with an not [that Bayesian] high dimension session with Michael Jordan (who gave a talk related to his MCMski lecture), Isa Verdinelli and Larry Wasserman.

Larry gave a [non-Bayesian, what else?!] talk on the problem of data splitting versus double use of the same data. Or rather using a model index estimated from a given dataset to estimate the properties of the mean of the same data. As in model selection. While splitting the data avoids all sorts of problem, not splitting the data but using a different loss function could avoid the issue. (And the infinite regress that if we keep conducting inference, we may have to split further and further the data.) Namely, if we were looking only at quantities that do not vary across models. So it is surprising that prediction get affected by this.

In a second session around Bayesian tests and model choice, Sarah Filippi presented the Bayesian non-parametric test she devised with Chris Holmes, using Polya trees. And mentioned our testing-by-mixture approach as a valuable alternative! Veronika Rockova talked about her new approach to efficient variable selection by spike-and-slab priors, through a mix of particle MCMC and EM, plus some variational Bayes motivations. (She also mentioned extensions by repulsive sampling through the pinball sampler, of which her recent AISTATS paper reminded me.)

Later in the evening, I figured out that the poster sessions that make the ISBA/Valencia meetings so unique are alas out of reach for me as the level of noise and my reduced hearing capacities (!) make impossible any prolonged discussion on any serious notion. No poster session for ‘Og’s men!, then, even though I can hang out at the fringe and chat with friends!