## No review this summer

Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , on September 19, 2019 by xi'an

A recent editorial in Nature was a declaration by a biologist from UCL on her refusal to accept refereeing requests during the summer (or was it the summer break), which was motivated by a need to reconnect with her son. Which is a good enough reason (!), but reflects sadly on the increasing pressure on one’s schedule to juggle teaching, research, administration, grant hunting, society service, along with a balanced enough family life. (Although I have been rather privileged in this regard!) Given that refereeing or journal editing is neither visible nor rewarded, it comes as the first task to be postponed or abandoned, even though most of us realise it is essential to keep science working as a whole and to make our own papers published. I have actually noticed an increasing difficulty in the past decade to get (good) referees to accept new reviews, often asking for deadlines that are hurting the authors, like six months. Making them practically unavailable. As I mentioned earlier on this blog, it could be that publishing referees’ reports as discussions would help, since they would become recognised as (unreviewed!) publications, but it is unclear this is the solution. If judging from the similar difficulty in getting discussions for discussed papers. (As an aside, there are two exciting papers coming up for discussion in Series B, ‘Unbiased Markov chain Monte Carlo methods with couplings’ by  Pierre E. Jacob, John O’Leary and Yves F. Atchadé and in Bayesian Analysis, Latent nested nonparametric priors by Frederico Camerlenghi, David Dunson, Antonio Lijoi, Igor Prünster, and Abel Rodríguez). Which is surprising when considering the willingness of a part of the community to engage into forii discussions, sometimes of a considerable length as illustrated on Andrew’s blog.

Another entry in Nature mentioned the case of two University of København tenured professors in geology who were fired for either using a private email address (?!) or being away on field work during an exam and at a conference without permission from the administration. Which does not even remotely sound like a faulty behaviour to me or else I would have been fired eons ago..!

## I’m getting the point

Posted in Statistics with tags , , , , , , on February 14, 2019 by xi'an

A long-winded X validated discussion on the [textbook] mean-variance conjugate posterior for the Normal model left me [mildly] depressed at the point and use of answering questions on this forum. Especially as it came at the same time as a catastrophic outcome for my mathematical statistics exam.  Possibly an incentive to quit X validated as one quits smoking, although this is not the first attempt

## exam question

Posted in Kids, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , on June 24, 2016 by xi'an

A question for my third year statistics exam that I borrowed from Cross Validated: no student even attempted to solve this question…!

And another one borrowed from the highly popular post on the random variable [almost] always smaller than its mean!

## done! [#1]

Posted in Kids, pictures, University life with tags , , , , , , on January 16, 2016 by xi'an

After spending a few hours grading my 127 exams for most nights of this week, I am finally done with it! One of the exam questions was the simulation of XY when (X,Y) is a bivariate normal vector with correlation ρ, following the trick described in a X validated question asked a few months ago, namely that

XY≡R{cos(πU)+ρ}

but no one managed to establish this representation. And, as usual, some students got confused between parameters θ and observations x when writing a posterior density, since the density of the prior was defined in the exam with the dummy x, thereby recovering the prior as the posterior. Nothing terrible and nothing exceptional with this cohort of undergraduates. And now I still have to go through my second pile of exams for the graduate course I taught on Bayesian computational tools…

Posted in Kids, pictures, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , on January 19, 2015 by xi'an

Now my grading is over, I can reflect on the unexpected difficulties in the mathematical statistics exam. I knew that the first question in the multiple choice exercise, borrowed from Cross Validation, was going to  be quasi-impossible and indeed only one student out of 118 managed to find the right solution. More surprisingly, most students did not manage to solve the (absence of) MLE when observing that n unobserved exponential Exp(λ) were larger than a fixed bound δ. I was also amazed that they did poorly on a N(0,σ²) setup, failing to see that

$\mathbb{E}[\mathbb{I}(X_1\le -1)] = \Phi(-1/\sigma)$

and determine an unbiased estimator that can be improved by Rao-Blackwellisation. No student reached the conditioning part. And a rather frequent mistake more understandable due to the limited exposure they had to Bayesian statistics: many confused parameter λ with observation x in the prior, writing

$\pi(\lambda|x) \propto \lambda \exp\{-\lambda x\} \times x^{a-1} \exp\{-bx\}$

$\pi(\lambda|x) \propto \lambda \exp\{-\lambda x\} \times \lambda^{a-1} \exp\{-b\lambda\}$