David Frazier’s talk on One World ABC seminar tomorrow [watch for the time!]

My friend and coauthor from Melbourne is giving the One World ABC seminar tomorrow. He will be talking at 10:30 UK time, 11:30 Brussels time, and 20:30 Melbourne time! On Robust and Efficient Approximate Bayesian Computation: A Minimum Distance Approach. Be on time!

research position at Monash

My friends (and coauthors) Gael Martin and David Frazier forwarded me this call for a two-year research research fellow position at Monash. Working with the team there on the most exciting topic of approximate Bayes!

The Research Fellow will conduct research associated with ARC Discovery Grant DP200101414: “Loss-Based Bayesian Prediction”. This project proposes a new paradigm for prediction. Using state-of-the-art computational methods, the project aims to produce accurate, fit for purpose predictions which, by design, reduce the loss incurred when the prediction is inaccurate. Theoretical validation of the new predictive method is an expected outcome, as is extensive application of the method to diverse empirical problems, including those based on high-dimensional and hierarchical data sets. The project will exploit recent advances in Bayesian computation, including approximate Bayesian computation and variational inference, to produce predictive distributions that are expressly designed to yield accurate predictions in a given loss measure. The Research Fellow would be expected to engage in all aspects of the research and would therefore build expertise in the methodological, theoretical and empirical aspects of this new predictive approach.

Deadline is 13 May 2020. This is definitely an offer to consider!

Colin Blyth (1922-2019)

While reading the IMS Bulletin (of March 2020), I found out that Canadian statistician Colin Blyth had died last summer. While we had never met in person, I remember his very distinctive and elegant handwriting in a few letters he sent me, including the above I have kept (along with an handwritten letter from Lucien Le Cam!). It contains suggestions about revising our Is Pitman nearness a reasonable criterion?, written with Gene Hwang and William Strawderman and which took three years to publish as it was deemed somewhat controversial. It actually appeared in JASA with discussions from Malay Ghosh, John Keating and Pranab K Sen, Shyamal Das Peddada, C. R. Rao, George Casella and Martin T. Wells, and Colin R. Blyth (with a much stronger wording than in the above letter!, like “What can be said but “It isn’t I, it’s you that are crazy?”). While I had used some of his admissibility results, including the admissibility of the Normal sample average in dimension one, e.g. in my book, I had not realised at the time that Blyth was (a) the first student of Erich Lehmann (b) the originator of [the name] Simpson’s paradox, (c) the scribe for Lehmann’s notes that would eventually lead to Testing Statistical Hypotheses and Theory of Point Estimation, later revised with George Casella. And (d) a keen bagpipe player and scholar.

robust Bayesian synthetic likelihood

David Frazier (Monash University) and Chris Drovandi (QUT) have recently come up with a robustness study of Bayesian synthetic likelihood that somehow mirrors our own work with David. In a sense, Bayesian synthetic likelihood is definitely misspecified from the start in assuming a Normal distribution on the summary statistics. When the data generating process is misspecified, even were the Normal distribution the “true” model or an appropriately converging pseudo-likelihood, the simulation based evaluation of the first two moments of the Normal is biased. Of course, for a choice of a summary statistic with limited information, the model can still be weakly compatible with the data in that there exists a pseudo-true value of the parameter θ⁰ for which the synthetic mean μ(θ⁰) is the mean of the statistics. (Sorry if this explanation of mine sounds unclear!) Or rather the Monte Carlo estimate of μ(θ⁰) coincidences with that mean.The same Normal toy example as in our paper leads to very poor performances in the MCMC exploration of the (unsympathetic) synthetic target. The robustification of the approach as proposed in the paper is to bring in an extra parameter to correct for the bias in the mean, using an additional Laplace prior on the bias to aim at sparsity. Or the same for the variance matrix towards inflating it. This over-parameterisation of the model obviously avoids the MCMC to get stuck (when implementing a random walk Metropolis with the target as a scale).

auxiliary likelihood ABC in print

Our paper with Gael Martin, Brendan McCabe , David Frazier and Worapree Maneesoonthorn, with full title Auxiliary Likelihood-Based Approximate Bayesian Computation in State Space Models, has now appeared in JCGS. To think that it started in Rimini in 2009, when I met Gael for the first time at the Rimini Bayesian Econometrics conference, although we really started working on the paper in 2012 when I visited Monash makes me realise the enormous investment we made in this paper, especially by Gael whose stamina and enthusiasm never cease to amaze me!