David Cox (1924-2022)

It is with much sadness that I heard from Oxford yesterday night that David Cox had passed away. Hither goes a giant of the field, whose contributions to theoretical and methodological statistics are enormous and whose impact on society is truly exceptional. He was the first recipient of the International Prize in Statistics in 2016 (aka the “Nobel of Statistics”) among many awards and a Fellow of the Royal Society among many other recognitions. He was also the editor of Biometrika for 25 years (!) and was still submitting papers to the journal a few month ago. Statistical Science published a conversation between Nancy Reid and him that tells a lot about the man and his amazing modesty. While I had met him in 1989, when he was visiting Cornell University as a distinguished visitor (and when I drove him to the house of Anne and George Casella for dinner once), then again in the 1990s when he came on a two-day visit to CREST,  we only really had a significant conversation in 2011 (!), when David and I attended the colloquium in honour of Mike Titterington in Glasgow and he proved to be most interested in the ABC algorithm. He published a connected paper in Biometrika the year after, with Christiana Katsonaki. We met a few more times later, always in Oxford, to again discuss ABC. In each occasion, he was incredibly kind and considerate.

coordinate sampler as a non-reversible Gibbs-like MCMC sampler

In connection with the talk I gave last July in Rennes for MCqMC 2018, I posted yesterday a preprint on arXiv of the work that my [soon to defend!] Dauphine PhD student Changye Wu and I did on an alternative PDMP. In this novel avatar of the zig-zag sampler,  a  non-reversible, continuous-time MCMC sampler, that we called the Coordinate Sampler, based on a piecewise deterministic Markov process. In addition to establishing the theoretical validity of this new sampling algorithm, we show in the same line as Deligiannidis et al.  (2018) that the Markov chain it induces exhibits geometrical ergodicity for distributions which tails decay at least as fast as an exponential distribution and at most as fast as a Gaussian distribution. A few numerical examples (a 2D banana shaped distribution à la Haario et al., 1999, strongly correlated high-dimensional normals, a log-Gaussian Cox process) highlight that our coordinate sampler is more efficient than the zig-zag sampler, in terms of effective sample size.Actually, we had sent this paper before the summer as a NIPS [2018] submission, but it did not make it through [the 4900 submissions this year and] the final review process, being eventually rated above the acceptance bar but not that above!