deadlines for BayesComp’2020

While I have forgotten to send a reminder that August 15 was the first deadline of BayesComp 2020 for the early registrations, here are further deadlines and dates

1. BayesComp 2020 occurs on January 7-10 2020 in Gainesville, Florida, USA
2. Registration is open with regular rates till October 14, 2019
3. Deadline for submission of poster proposals is December 15, 2019
4. Deadline for travel support applications is September 20, 2019
5. There are four free tutorials on January 7, 2020, related with Stan, NIMBLE, SAS, and AutoStat

conditional noise contrastive estimation

At ICML last year, Ciwan Ceylan and Michael Gutmann presented a new version of noise constrative estimation to deal with intractable constants. While noise contrastive estimation relies upon a second independent sample to contrast with the observed sample, this approach uses instead a perturbed or noisy version of the original sample, for instance a Normal generation centred at the original datapoint. And eliminates the annoying constant by breaking the (original and noisy) samples into two groups. The probability to belong to one group or the other then does not depend on the constant, which is a very effective trick. And can be optimised with respect to the parameters of the model of interest. Recovering the score matching function of Hyvärinen (2005). While this is in line with earlier papers by Gutmann and Hyvärinen, this line of reasoning (starting with Charlie Geyer’s logistic regression) never ceases to amaze me!

green sunset [jatp]

MaxEnt 2019 [last call]

For those who definitely do not want to attend O’Bayes 2019 in Warwick,  the Max Ent 2019 conference is taking place at the Max Planck Institute for plasma physics in Garching, near Münich, (south) Germany at the same time. Registration is still open at a reduced rate and it is yet not too late to submit an abstract. A few hours left. (While it is still possible to submit a poster for O’Bayes 2019 and to register.)

BayesComp 20 [full program]

The full program is now available on the conference webpage of BayesComp 20, next 7-10 Jan 2020. There are eleven invited sessions, including one j-ISBA session, and a further thirteen contributed sessions were selected by the scientific committee. Calls are still open for tutorials on Tuesday 07 January (with two already planed on Nimble and AutoStat) and for posters. Now is the best time for registering! Note also that travel support should be available for junior researchers.

Bayesian econometrics in St. Andrews

A call I received for the incoming 2019 edition of the European Seminar on Bayesian Econometrics (ESOBE), sponsored by the EFaB section of ISBA, which is going to be held at the University of St Andrews in Scotland on Monday 2 and Tuesday 3 September, 2019. I have attended an earlier edition in Venezia and enjoyed it very much. Plus, summer in Scotland…, where else?! Submission of papers is still open:

We aim to have a balance of keynotes from both statistics and econometrics, in order to stimulate submissions from statisticians working on Bayesian methodology or applications in economics/finance. We particularly welcome submissions from young Bayesians (PhDs, PostDocs, assistant professors — EFaB funds a “young researcher session” with up to $500 per speaker).

BayesComp 20 [registration open]

The registration page is now open for BayesComp 20, in Gainesville, Florida, next 7-10 Jan 2020. The fees are quite moderate, imho, given the fact that they cover all breaks (if not the conference dinner). Deadline for these early rates is August 14. There will also be travel support from various sponsors, with deadline for application being September 20. Contributed sessions will be announced soon, with possible openings for last minute breakthrough sessions. Calls are still open for tutorials on 07 January and for posters.