congrats, Håvard!!!

ISBA on INLA [webinar]

If you have missed the item of information, Håvard Rue is giving an ISBA webinar tomorrow on INLA:

the ISBA Webinar on INLA is scheduled for April 4th, 2013
from 8:30 - 12:30 EDT.

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To join the online meeting (Now from mobile devices using the Cisco WebEx
Meeting App)
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1. Go to  https://www.webex.com/login/attend-a-meeting
2. Enter the meeting number  730 293 070 and click Join Now
3. Enter your name and email address, the meeting password and
click "Join Now"

A recording of the webinar will be provided shortly after the event.

Please verify that your computer is capable of connecting using WebEx at

https://support.webex.com/MyAccountWeb/systemRequirement.do?root=Tools&parent=System

or see https://www.webex.com/login/join-meeting-tips  if you are having
trouble connecting.

Latent Gaussian Models im Zürich [day 1]

An interesting first day (for me) at the Latent Gaussian Models workshop in Zürich. The workshop is obviously centred at the INLA approach, with Havard Rue giving a short course on Wednesday then a wide ranging tour of the applications and extensions of INLA this afternoon. Thanks to his efforts in making the method completely accessible for many models through an R package, using mode description commands like

inla(formula, family="weibull", data=Kidney, control.inla=list(h=0.001))

there is now a growing community of INLA users. As exemplified by the attendees to this workshop. Chris Holmes gave another of his inspirational talks this afternoon when defending the use of quasi-Monte Carlo methods in Bayes factor approximations. The model choice session this morning showed interesting directions, including a calibration of the Hellinger distance by Bernoulli distributions, while the application session this afternoon covered owls, bulls, and woolly mammoths. I even managed to speak about ABC model choice, Gaussian approximations of Ising models, stochastic volatility modelling, and grey codes for variable selection, before calling it a (full and fruitful) day!