## a hatchet job [book review]

Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , on July 20, 2019 by xi'an

By happenstance, I came across a rather savage review of John Hartigan’s Bayes Theory (1984) written by Bruce Hill in HASA, including the following slivers:

“By and large this book is at its best in developing the mathematical consequences of the theory and at its worst when dealing with the underlying ideas and concepts, which seems unfortunate since Bayesian statistics is above all an attempt to deal realistically with the nature of uncertainty and decision making.” B. Hill, JASA, 1986, p.569

“Unfortunately, those who had hoped for a serious contribution to the question will be disappointed.” B. Hill, JASA, 1986, p.569

“If the primary concern is mathematical convenience, not content or meaning, then the enterprise is a very different matter from what most of us think of as Bayesian approach.” B. Hill, JASA, 1986, p.570

“Perhaps in a century or two statisticians and probabilists will reach a similar state of maturity.” B. Hill, JASA, 1986, p.570

Perhaps this is a good place to mention that the notation in the book is formidable. Bayes’s theorem appears in a form that is  almost unrecognizable. As elsewhere, the mathematical treatment is elegant. but none of the deeper issues about the meaning and interpretation of conditional probability is discussed.” B. Hill, JASA, 1986, p.570

“The reader will find many intriguing ideas, much that is outrageous, and even some surprises (the likelihood principle is not mentioned, and conditional inference is just barely mentioned).” B. Hill, JASA, 1986, p.571

What is disappointing to me is that with a little more discipline and effort with regard to the ideas underlying Bayesian statistics, this book could have been a major contribution to the theory.” B. Hill, JASA, 1986, p.571

Another review by William Sudderth (1985, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society) is much kinder to the book, except for the complaint that “the pace is brisk and sometimes hard to follow”.

Posted in Books, Kids, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 28, 2014 by xi'an

Today was the very last session of our Reading Classics Seminar for the academic year 2013-2014. We listened two presentations, one on the Casella and Strawderman (1984) paper on the estimation of the normal bounded mean. And one on the Hartigan and Wong’s 1979 K-Means Clustering Algorithm paper in JRSS C. The first presentation did not go well as my student had difficulties with the maths behind the paper. (As he did not come to ask me or others for help, it may well be that he put this talk together at the last minute, at a time busy with finals and project deliveries. He also failed to exploit those earlier presentations of the paper.) The innovative part in the talk was the presentation of several R simulations comparing the risk of the minimax Bayes estimator with the one for the MLE. Although the choice of simulating different samples of standard normals for different values of the parameters and even for both estimators made the curves (unnecessarily) all wiggly.

By contrast, the second presentation was very well-designed, with great Beamer slides, interactive features and a software oriented focus. My student Mouna Berrada started from the existing R function kmeans to explain the principles of the algorithm, recycling the interactive presentation of last year as well (with my permission), and creating a dynamic flowchart that was most helpful. So she made the best of this very short paper! Just (predictably) missing the question of the statistical model behind the procedure. During the discussion, I mused why k-medians clustering was not more popular as it offered higher robustness guarantees, albeit further away from a genuine statistical model. And why k-means clustering was not more systematically compared with mixture (EM) estimation.

Here are the slides for the second talk

This year, a lot of my Master students (plus all of my PhD students) registered for the Reading Classics Seminar course, so we should spend half of the year going through those “classics“. And have lively discussions thanks to the size of the group. The first student to present a paper, Céline Beji, chose Hartigan and Wong’s 1979 K-Means Clustering Algorithm paper in JRSS C. She did quite well, esp. when considering she had two weeks to learn $\mathrm{L\!\!^{{}_{\scriptstyle A}} \!\!\!\!\!\;\; T\!_{\displaystyle E} \! X}$ and Beamer in addition to getting thru the paper! She also managed to find an online demo of the algorithm. Here are her slides