Archive for Les Houches
Tramway du Mont Blanc [jatp]
Posted in Statistics with tags Aiguille de Bionassay, downhill skiing, French Alps, hiking, jatp, Kandahar, Les Houches, Mont Blanc, Saint-Gervais-les-Bains, Savoie, TMB, tramways, winter sports on March 27, 2022 by xi'an
Mont Blanc [jatp]
Posted in Mountains, pictures, Running, Travel with tags Aiguille de Bionassay, Aiguille du Midi, French Alps, Grandes Jorasses, Italian Alps, jatp, Les Houches, Mont Blanc, Saint-Gervais-les-Bains, Savoie, ski town on March 23, 2022 by xi'an
off to Chamonix!
Posted in Statistics with tags Aiguille des Grands Charmoz, Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, French Alps, ice climbing, jatp, Les Houches, MCMSki IV, Mont Blanc, ski resorts, ski town, vacations on February 1, 2020 by xi'an
off to Chamonix!
Posted in Mountains, pictures, Running, Travel with tags Aiguille des Grands Charmoz, Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, French Alps, ice climbing, jatp, Les Houches, MCMSki IV, Mont Blanc, ski town, vacations on March 2, 2018 by xi'an
expectation-propagation from Les Houches
Posted in Books, Mountains, pictures, Statistics, University life with tags belief propagation, book review, Chamonix, CHANCE, expectation-propagation, French Alps, Lasso, Les Houches, Oxford University Press, sparsity, summer school on February 3, 2016 by xi'an
As CHANCE book editor, I received the other day from Oxford University Press acts from an École de Physique des Houches on Statistical Physics, Optimisation, Inference, and Message-Passing Algorithms that took place there in September 30 – October 11, 2013. While it is mostly unrelated with Statistics, and since Igor Caron already reviewed the book a year and more ago, I skimmed through the few chapters connected to my interest, from Devavrat Shah’s chapter on graphical models and belief propagation, to Andrea Montanari‘s denoising and sparse regression, including LASSO, and only read in some detail Manfred Opper’s expectation propagation chapter. This paper made me realise (or re-realise as I had presumably forgotten an earlier explanation!) that expectation propagation can be seen as a sort of variational approximation that produces by a sequence of iterations the distribution within a certain parametric (exponential) family that is the closest to the distribution of interest. By writing the Kullback-Leibler divergence the opposite way from the usual variational approximation, the solution equates the expectation of the natural sufficient statistic under both models… Another interesting aspect of this chapter is the connection with estimating normalising constants. (I noticed a slight typo on p.269 in the final form of the Kullback approximation q() to p().
Xi'an's Og 