visit to ISU

 

A short visit to ISU but and therefore a busy and proftable day! About ten appointments in Snedecor Hall after a nice morning run, a highly attended Zyskind Lecture, and many interesting discussions all over the day: e.g., I had a great time discussing using null recurrent Markov chains for integral approximations with Krishna Athreya and Vivek Roy, following Vivek’s seminar last week, ABC for spatial point processes with Alicia Carriquiry and Kristian Schmidt, SMC and ABC with [fellow blogger] Jarad Niemi, empirical likelihood with Song Chen, and hierarchical Bayes modelling and model checking with Mark Kaiser. I also met an impressive PhD student, Yihui Xie, who seems to have an endless pool of energy as he develops R packages by the dozen, such as animation, formatR, and knitr such as animation, formatR, and knitr, the later being an alternative to sweave, works on a book and seems to be contributing a lot to community sites like RPubs, in addition to maintaining his own blog… I actually took the opportunity to ask him a problem that bugged me for a while, namely how to include R code within beamer so that when I give a class/talk I can click on the code and see the output coming on the slide…

the anti-Bayesian moment and its passing

Today, our reply to the discussion of our American Statistician paper “Not only defended but also applied” by Stephen Fienberg, Wes Johnson, Deborah Mayo, and Stephen Stiegler,, was posted on arXiv. It is kind of funny that this happens the day I am visiting Iowa State University Statistics Department, a department that was formerly a Fisherian and thus anti-Bayesian stronghold. (Not any longer, to be sure! I was also surprised to discover that before the creation of the department, Henry Wallace, came to lecture on machine calculations for statistical methods…in 1924!)

The reply to the discussion was rewritten and much broadened by Andrew after I drafted a more classical point-by-point reply to our four discussants, much to its improvement. For one thing, it reads well on its own, as the discussions are not yet available on-line. For another, it gives a broader impact of the discussion, which suits well the readership of The American Statistician. (Some of my draft reply is recycled in this post.)