Alan Gelfand in Paris

Alan Gelfand (Duke University) will be in Paris on the week of May 15 and give several seminars, including one at AgroParisTech on May 16:

Modèles hiérarchiques

and on at CREST (BiPS)  on May 18, 2pm:

Scalable Gaussian processes for analyzing space and space-time datasets

talk at Trinity College

Tomorrow noon, I will give a talk at Trinity College Dublin on the asymptotic properties of ABC. (Here are the slides from the talk I gave in Berlin last month.)

Gregynog #2 [jatp]

MDL multiple hypothesis testing

“This formulation reveals an interesting connection between multiple hypothesis testing and mixture modelling with the class labels corresponding to the accepted hypotheses in each test.”

After my seminar at Monash University last Friday, David Dowe pointed out to me the recent work by Enes Makalic and Daniel Schmidt on minimum description length (MDL) methods for multiple testing as somewhat related to our testing by mixture paper. Work which appeared in the proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Information Theoretic Methods in Science and Engineering (WITMSE-11), that took place in Helsinki, Finland, in 2011. Minimal encoding length approaches lead to choosing the model that enjoys the smallest coding length. Connected with, e.g., Rissannen‘s approach. The extension in this paper consists in considering K hypotheses at once on a collection of m datasets (the multiple then bears on the datasets rather than on the hypotheses). And to associate an hypothesis index to each dataset. When the objective function is the sum of (generalised) penalised likelihoods [as in BIC], it leads to selecting the “minimal length” model for each dataset. But the authors introduce weights or probabilities for each of the K hypotheses, which indeed then amounts to a mixture-like representation on the exponentiated codelengths. Which estimation by optimal coding was first proposed by Chris Wallace in his book. This approach eliminates the model parameters at an earlier stage, e.g. by maximum likelihood estimation, to return a quantity that only depends on the model index and the data. In fine, the purpose of the method differs from ours in that the former aims at identifying an appropriate hypothesis for each group of observations, rather than ranking those hypotheses for the entire dataset by considering the posterior distribution of the weights in the later. The mixture has somehow more of a substance in the first case, where separating the datasets into groups is part of the inference.

Michael Jordan’s seminar in Paris next week

Next week, on June 7, at 4pm, Michael will give a seminar at INRIA, rue du Charolais, Paris 12 (map). Here is the abstract:

A Variational Perspective on Accelerated Methods in Optimization

Accelerated gradient methods play a central role in optimization,achieving optimal rates in many settings. While many generalizations and extensions of Nesterov’s original acceleration method have been proposed,it is not yet clear what is the natural scope of the acceleration concept.In this paper, we study accelerated methods from a continuous-time perspective. We show that there is a Lagrangian functional that we call the Bregman Lagrangian which generates a large class of accelerated methods in continuous time, including (but not limited to) accelerated gradient descent, its non-Euclidean extension, and accelerated higher-order gradient methods. We show that the continuous-time limit of all of these methods correspond to travelling the same curve in space time at different speeds, and in this sense the continuous-time setting is the natural one for understanding acceleration.  Moreover, from this perspective, Nesterov’s technique and many of its generalizations can be viewed as a systematic way to go from the continuous-time curves generated by the Bregman Lagrangian to a family of discrete-time accelerated algorithms. [Joint work with Andre Wibisono and Ashia Wilson.]

(Interested readers need to register to attend the lecture.)

Rémi Bardenet’s seminar

Next week, Rémi Bardenet is giving a seminar in Paris, Thursday April 14, 2pm, in ENSAE [room 15] on MCMC methods for tall data. Unfortunately, I will miss this opportunity to discuss with Rémi as I will be heading to La Sapienza, Roma, for Clara Grazian‘s PhD defence the next day.  And on Monday afternoon, April 11, Nicolas Chopin will give a talk on quasi-Monte Carlo for sequential problems at Institut Henri Poincaré.

seminar in Harvard

Next week, I will be in Harvard Monday and Tuesday, visiting friends in the Department of Statistics and giving a seminar. The slides for the talk will be quite similar to those of my talk in Bristol, a few weeks ago. Hopefully, there will not be too much overlap between both audiences! And hopefully I’ll manage to get to my conclusion before all hell breaks loose (which is why I strategically set my conclusion in the early slides!)