“one of New Zealand’s darkest days”

the luminaries [book review]

I bought this book by Eleanor Catton on my trip to Pittsburgh and Toronto in 2013 (thanks to Amazon associates’ gains!), mostly by chance (and also because it was the most recent Man Booker Prize). After a few sleepless nights last week (when I should not have been suffering from New York jet lag!, given my sleeping pattern when abroad), I went through this rather intellectual and somewhat contrived mystery. To keep with tradition (!), the cover was puzzling me until I realised those were phases of the moon, in line with [spoiler!] the zodiacal underlying pattern of the novel, pattern I did not even try to follow for it sounded so artificial. And presumably restricted the flow of the story by imposing further constraints on the characters’ interactions.

The novel has redeeming features, even though I am rather bemused at it getting a Man Booker Prize. (When compared with, say, The Remains of the Day…) For one thing, while a gold rush story of the 1860’s, it takes place on the South Island of New Zealand instead of Klondike, around the Hokitika gold-field, on the West Coast, with mentions of places that brings memory of our summer (well, winter!) visit to Christchurch in 2006… The mix of cultures between English settlers, Maoris, and Chinese migrants, is well-documented and information, if rather heavy at times, bordering on the info-dump, and a central character like the Maori Te Rau Tauwhare sounds caricaturesque. The fact that the story takes place in Victorian times call Dickens to mind, but I find very little connection in either style or structure, nor with Victorian contemporaries like Wilkie Collins, and Victorian pastiches like Charles Palliser‘s Quincunx…. Nothing of the sanctimonious and moral elevation and subtle irony one could expect from a Victorian novel!

While a murder mystery, the plot is fairly upside down (or down under?!): the (spoiler!) assumed victim is missing for most of the novel, the (spoiler!) extracted gold is not apparently stolen but rather lacks owner(s), and the most moral character of the story ends up being the local prostitute. The central notion of the twelve men in a council each bringing a new light on the disappearance of Emery Staines is a neat if not that innovative literary trick but twelve is a large number which means following many threads, some being dead-ends, to gather an appearance of a view on the whole story. As in Rashomon, one finishes the story with a deep misgiving as to who did what, after so many incomplete and biased accountings. Unlike Rashomon, it alas takes forever to reach this point!

Bayesian multimodel inference by RJMCMC: A Gibbs sampling approach

Barker (from the lovely city of Dunedin) and Link published a paper in the American Statistician last September that I missed, as I missed their earlier email about the paper since it arrived The Day After… The paper is about a new specification of RJMCMC, almost twenty years after Peter Green’s (1995) introduction of the method. The authors use the notion of a palette, “from which all model specific parameters can be calculated” (in a deterministic way). One can see the palette ψ as an intermediary step in the move between two models. This reduces the number of bijections, if not the construction of the dreaded Jacobians!, but forces the construction of pseudo-priors on the unessential parts of ψ for every model. Because the dimension of ψ is fixed, a Gibbs sampling interleaving model index and palette value is then implementable. The conditional of the model index given the palette is available provided there are not too many models under competitions, with the probabilities recyclable towards a Rao-Blackwell approximation of the model probability. I wonder at whether or not another Rao-Blackwellisation is possible, namely to draw from all the simulated palettes a sample for the parameter of an arbitrarily chosen model.

arXiv postings

Two interesting postings by Matthew Schofield and Richard Barker (from the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand):

• Data Augmentation and Reversible Jump MCMC for Multinomial Index Problems
• Full Open Population Capture-Recapture Models with Individual Covariates.

along with a few recent postings:

• Learning Latent Tree Graphical Models
• Pac-Bayesian bounds for sparse regression estimation with exponential weights