wildlife photograph of the year [2015]

Judith Rousseau gets Bernoulli Society Ethel Newbold Prize

As announced at the 60th ISI World Meeting in Rio de Janeiro, my friend, co-author, and former PhD student Judith Rousseau got the first Ethel Newbold Prize! Congrats, Judith! And well-deserved! The prize is awarded by the Bernoulli Society on the following basis

The Ethel Newbold Prize is to be awarded biannually to an outstanding statistical scientist for a body of work that represents excellence in research in mathematical statistics, and/or excellence in research that links developments in a substantive field to new advances in statistics. In any year in which the award is due, the prize will not be awarded unless the set of all nominations includes candidates from both genders.

and is funded by Wiley. I support very much this (inclusive) approach of “recognizing the importance of women in statistics”, without creating a prize restricted to women nominees (and hence exclusive).  Thanks to the members of the Program Committee of the Bernoulli Society for setting that prize and to Nancy Reid in particular.

Ethel Newbold was a British statistician who worked during WWI in the Ministry of Munitions and then became a member of the newly created Medical Research Council, working on medical and industrial studies. She was the first woman to receive the Guy Medal in Silver in 1928. Just to stress that much remains to be done towards gender balance, the second and last woman to get a Guy Medal in Silver is Sylvia Richardson, in 2009… (In addition, Valerie Isham, Nicky Best, and Fiona Steele got a Guy Medal in Bronze, out of the 71 so far awarded, while no woman ever got a Guy Medal in Gold.) Funny occurrences of coincidence: Ethel May Newbold was educated at Tunbridge Wells, the place where Bayes was a minister, while Sylvia is now head of the Medical Research Council biostatistics unit in Cambridge.

Introduction to Monte Carlo methods with R and Bayesian Essentials with R

Here are the  download figures for my e-book with George as sent to me last week by my publisher Springer-Verlag.  With an interesting surge in the past year. Maybe simply due to new selling strategies of the published rather to a wider interest in the book. (My royalties have certainly not increased!) Anyway thanks to all readers. As an aside for wordpress wannabe bloggers, I realised it is now almost impossible to write tables with WordPress, another illustration of the move towards small-device-supported blogs. Along with a new annoying “simpler” (or more accurately dumber) interface and a default font far too small for my eyesight. So I advise alternatives to wordpress that are more sympathetic to maths contents (e.g., using MathJax) and comfortable editing.

And the same for the e-book with Jean-Michel, which only appeared in late 2013. And contains more chapters than Introduction to Monte Carlo methods with R. Incidentally, a reader recently pointed out to me the availability of a pirated version of The Bayesian Choice on a Saudi (religious) university website. And of a pirated version of Introducing Monte Carlo with R on a Saõ Paulo (Brazil) university website. This may be alas inevitable, given the diffusion by publishers of e-chapters that can be copied with no limitations…

published in Brazilian Journal of Probability and Statistics, esplêndido!

Our paper “Bayesian computation for statistical models with intractable normalizing constants” written with Yves Atchadé and Nicolas Lartillot has now appeared in the Brazilian Journal of Probability and Statistics! (This is my first paper in this journal.) Although we could have used ABC steps to approximate the posterior, we chose instead a Wang-Landau approach that has exact convergence properties and extends the 1992 Read Paper by Charlie Geyer and Elisabeth Thompson.

Bayes by the Bay

No, no, this is not an announcement for a meeting on an Australian beach (which is Bayes on the Beach, taking place next November (6-8) on the Sunshine Coast and is organised by Kerrie Mengersen’s BRAG, at QUT, that I just left! With Robert Wolpert as the international keynote speaker and Matt Wand as the Australian keynote speaker.) Bayes by the Bay is “a pedagogical workshop on Bayesian methods in Science” organised by the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, based in the CIT campus in Chennai. It is taking place on January 4-8, 2013, in Pondichéry. (To use the French spelling of this former comptoir of French India…) Just prior to the ISBA Varanasi meeting on Bayesian Statistics.

Great: the webpage for the workshop uses the attached picture of Pierre-Simon (de) Laplace, rather than the unlikely picture of Thomas Bayes found all over the place (incl. this blog!). This was also the case in Christensen et al.’s Bayesian ideas and data analysis. So maybe there is a trend there. I also like the name “Bayes by the Bay“, as it reminds me of a kid song we used to sing to/with our kids when they were young, “down by the bay“, after a summer vacation with Anne and George Casella…

Coincidentally, my re-read of Laplace’s Théorie Analytique des Probabilitiés just appeared (in English) in the Boletim ISBrA, the dynamic Brazilian branch of ISBA.

Théorie analytique des probabilités

The Brazilian society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBrA, whose annual meeting is taking place at this very time!) asked me to write a review on Pierre Simon Laplace’s book, Théorie Analytique des Probabilités, a book that was initially published in 1812, exactly two centuries ago. I promptly accepted this request as (a) I had never looked at this book and so this provided me with a perfect opportunity to do so, (b) while in Vancouver, Julien Cornebise had bought for me a 1967 reproduction of the 1812 edition,  (c) I was curious to see how much of the book had permeated modern probability and statistics or, conversely, how much of Laplace’s perspective was still understandable by modern day standards. (Note that the link on the book leads to a free version of the 1814, not 1812, edition of the book, as free as the kindle version on amazon.)

“Je m’attache surtout, à déterminer la probabilité des causes et des résultats indiqués par événemens considérés en grand nombre.” P.S. Laplace, Théorie Analytique des Probabilités, page 3

First, I must acknowledge I found the book rather difficult to read and this for several reasons: (a) as is the case for books from older times, the ratio text-to-formulae is very high, with an inconvenient typography and page layout (ar least for actual standards), so speed-reading is impossible; (b) the themes offered in succession are often abruptly brought and uncorrelated with the previous ones; (c) the mathematical notations are 18th-century, so sums are indicated by S, exponentials by c, and so on, which again slows down reading and understanding; (d) for all of the above reasons, I often missed the big picture and got mired into technical details until they made sense or I gave up; (e) I never quite understood whether or not Laplace was interested in the analytics like generating functions only to provide precise numerical approximations or for their own sake. Hence a form of disappointment by the end of the book, most likely due to my insufficient investment in the project (on which I mostly spent an Amsterdam/Calgary flight and jet-lagged nights at BIRS…), even though I got excited by finding the bits and pieces about Bayesian estimation and testing.