mini-Bayes in Nature [and Paris-Saclay]

bravo, Dr. Robert!!!

Last Friday, our daughter Rachel attended the graduation ceremony for her medical school cohort master graduation. On the Saclay campus next to ENSAE (and so did we!), with nice and short talks by medicine professors and the University President, with a massive (?!) conflict of interest as her own daughter was part of this cohort!  And learned that she will work her first medical internship semester in French Guiana, next month, as part of her choice of a medical specialisation in internal medicine in the French Caribbean departments, over the five next years. Congrats to her and all of her fantastic friends for this massive achievement!!! And [fatherly and a wee bit anxious!] best wishes for this new and exciting period of her life!!! (And concerned thoughts for her female doctor colleagues at the French Institute for Mothers and Children in Kabul, like Dr. Arifa and Dr. Shoranghaize. interviewed in Le Monde the same day.)

assistant/associate professor position in statistics/machine-learning at ENSAE

ENSAE (my Alma Mater) is opening a new position for next semester in statistics or/and machine-learning. At the Assistant Professor level, the position is for an initial three-year term, renewable for another three years, before the tenure evaluation. The school is located on the Université Paris-Saclay campus, only teaches at the Master and PhD levels, and the deadline for application is 31 March 2020. Details and contacts on the call page.

local mayhem, again and again and again…

The public transports in France and in particular in Paris have now been on strike for three weeks. In connection with a planned reform of the retirement conditions of workers with special status, like those in the train and metro companies, who can retire earlier than the legal age (62). As usual with social unrest in France, other categories joined the strike and the protest, including teachers and health service public workers, as well as police officers, fire-fighters and opera dancers, and even some students. Below are some figures from the OECD about average retirement conditions in nearby EU countries that show that these conditions are apparently better in France. (With the usual provision that these figures have been correctly reported.) In particular, the life expectancy at the start of retirement is the highest for both men and women. Coincidence (or not), my UCU affiliated colleagues in Warwick were also on strike a few weeks ago about their pensions…

Travelling through and around Paris by bike, I have not been directly affected by the strikes (as heavy traffic makes biking easier!), except for the morning of last week when I was teaching at ENSAE, when I blew up a tyre midway there and had to hop to the nearest train station to board the last train of the morning, arriving (only) 10mn late. Going back home was only feasible by taxi, which happened to be large enough to take my bicycle as well… Travelling to and from the airport for Vancouver and Birmingham was equally impossible by public transportation, meaning spending fair amounts of time in and money on taxis! And listening to taxi-drivers’ opinions or musical tastes. Nothing to moan about when considering the five to six hours spent by some friends of mine to get to work and back.

ABC-SAEM

In connection with the recent PhD thesis defence of Juliette Chevallier, in which I took a somewhat virtual part for being physically in Warwick, I read a paper she wrote with Stéphanie Allassonnière on stochastic approximation versions of the EM algorithm. Computing the MAP estimator can be done via some adapted for simulated annealing versions of EM, possibly using MCMC as for instance in the Monolix software and its MCMC-SAEM algorithm. Where SA stands sometimes for stochastic approximation and sometimes for simulated annealing, originally developed by Gilles Celeux and Jean Diebolt, then reframed by Marc Lavielle and Eric Moulines [friends and coauthors]. With an MCMC step because the simulation of the latent variables involves an untractable normalising constant. (Contrary to this paper, Umberto Picchini and Adeline Samson proposed in 2015 a genuine ABC version of this approach, paper that I thought I missed—although I now remember discussing it with Adeline at JSM in Seattle—, ABC is used as a substitute for the conditional distribution of the latent variables given data and parameter. To be used as a substitute for the Q step of the (SA)EM algorithm. One more approximation step and one more simulation step and we would reach a form of ABC-Gibbs!) In this version, there are very few assumptions made on the approximation sequence, except that it converges with the iteration index to the true distribution (for a fixed observed sample) if convergence of ABC-SAEM is to happen. The paper takes as an illustrative sequence a collection of tempered versions of the true conditionals, but this is quite formal as I cannot fathom a feasible simulation from the tempered version and not from the untempered one. It is thus much more a version of tempered SAEM than truly connected with ABC (although a genuine ABC-EM version could be envisioned).