[summer Astrostat school] room with a view [jatp]

I just arrived in Autrans, on the Plateau du Vercors overlooking Grenoble and the view is fabulistic! Trees have started to turn red and yellow, the weather is very mild, and my duties are restricted to teaching ABC to a group of enthusiastic astronomers and cosmologists..! Second advanced course on ABC in the mountains this year, hard to beat (except by a third course). The surroundings are so serene and peaceful that I even conceded to install RStudio for my course! Instead of sticking to my favourite vim editor and line commands.

ABC’ory in Banff [17w5025]

The ABC workshop I co-organised has now started and, despite a few last minutes cancellations, we have gathered a great crowd of researchers on the validation and expansion of ABC methods. Or ABC’ory to keep up with my naming of workshops. The videos of the talks should come up progressively on the BIRS webpage. When I did not forget to launch the recording. The program is quite open and with this size of workshop allows for talks and discussions to last longer than planned: the first days contain several expository talks on ABC convergence, auxiliary or synthetic models, summary constructions, challenging applications, dynamic models, and model assessment. Plus prepared discussions on those topics that hopefully involve several workshop participants. We had also set some time for snap-talks, to induce everyone to give a quick presentation of one’s on-going research and open problems. The first day was rather full but saw a lot of interactions and discussions during and around the talks, a mood I hope will last till Friday! Today in replacement of Richard Everitt who alas got sick just before the workshop, we are conducting a discussion on dimensional issues, part of which is made of parts of the following slides (mostly recycled from earlier talks, including the mini-course in Les Diablerets):

ABC in Les Diablerets

Since I could not download the slides of my ABC course in Les Diablerets in one go, I broke them by chapters as follows. (Warning: there is very little novelty in those slides, except for the final part on consistency.)

Although I did not do it on purpose (!), starting with indirect inference and other methods inspired from econometrics induced some discussion in the first hour of the course with econometricians in the room. Including Elvezio Ronchetti.

I also regretted piling too much material in the alphabet soup, as it was too widespread for a new audience. And as I could not keep the coherence of the earlier parts by going thru so many papers at once. Especially since I was a bit knackered after a day of skiing….

I managed to get to the final convergence chapter on the last day, even though I had to skip some of the earlier material. Which should be reorganised anyway as the parts between model choice with random forests and inference with random forests are not fully connected!

Les Diablerets skyline [jatp]

The short course I gave in Les Diablerets, Switzerland, was highly enjoyable, at least for me!, as it gave me the opportunity to present an  overview of the field, just before our workshop in Banff and to stay in a fantastic skiing area for four days! While I found out that my limited skiing skills are gone even more limited, the constant fresh snow falling during my stay and the very small number of people on the slopes made the outdoor highly enjoyable, the more because the temperatures were quite tolerable. The above picture was taken on the only morning it did not snow, with a nice cloud inversion over the valley separating France and Switzerland.

whiteout in Les Diablerets [jatp]