reading classics (The End)

Today was the final session of our Reading Classics Seminar for the academic year 2014-2015. I have not reported on this seminar much so far because it has had starting problems, namely hardly any student present on the first classes and therefore several re-starts until we reached a small group of interested students. And this is truly The End for this enjoyable experiment as this is the final year for my TSI Master at Paris-Dauphine, as it will become integrated within the new MASH Master next year.

As a last presentation for the entire series, my student picked John Skilling’s Nested Sampling, not that it was in my list of “classics”, but he had worked on the paper in a summer project and was thus reasonably fluent with the topic. As he did a good enough job (!), here are his slides.

Some of the questions that came to me during the talk were on how to run nested sampling sequentially, both in the data and in the number of simulated points, and on incorporating more deterministic moves in order to remove some of the Monte Carlo variability. I was about to ask about (!) the Hamiltonian version of nested sampling but then he mentioned his last summer internship on this very topic! I also realised during that talk that the formula (for positive random variables)

does not require absolute continuity of the distribution F.

a week in Oxford

I spent [most of] the past week in Oxford in connection with our joint OxWaSP PhD program, which is supported by the EPSRC, and constitutes a joint Centre of Doctoral Training in  statistical science focussing on data-­intensive environments and large-­scale models. The first cohort of a dozen PhD students had started their training last Fall with the first year spent in Oxford, before splitting between Oxford and Warwick to write their thesis.  Courses are taught over a two week block, with a two day introduction to the theme (Bayesian Statistics in my case), followed by reading, meetings, daily research talks, mini-projects, and a final day in Warwick including presentations of the mini-projects and a concluding seminar.  (involving Jonty Rougier and Robin Ryder, next Friday). This approach by bursts of training periods is quite ambitious in that it requires a lot from the students, both through the lectures and in personal investment, and reminds me somewhat of a similar approach at École Polytechnique where courses are given over fairly short periods. But it is also profitable for highly motivated and selected students in that total immersion into one topic and a large amount of collective work bring them up to speed with a reasonable basis and the option to write their thesis on that topic. Hopefully, I will see some of those students next year in Warwick working on some Bayesian analysis problem!

On a personal basis, I also enjoyed very much my time in Oxford, first for meeting with old friends, albeit too briefly, and second for cycling, as the owner of the great Airbnb place I rented kindly let me use her bike to go around, which allowed me to go around quite freely! Even on a train trip to Reading. As it was a road racing bike, it took me a trip or two to get used to it, especially on the first day when the roads were somewhat icy, but I enjoyed the lightness of it, relative to my lost mountain bike, to the point of considering switching to a road bike for my next bike… I had also some apprehensions with driving at night, which I avoid while in Paris, but got over them until the very last night when I had a very close brush with a car entering from a side road, which either had not seen me or thought I would let it pass. Gave me the opportunity of shouting Oï!

reflections on the probability space induced by moment conditions with implications for Bayesian Inference [slides]

Here are the slides of my incoming discussion of Ron Gallant’s paper, tomorrow.

a weird beamer feature…

As I was preparing my slides for my third year undergraduate stat course, I got a weird error that got a search on the Web to unravel:

! Extra }, or forgotten \endgroup.
\endframe ->\egroup
  \begingroup \def \@currenvir {frame}
l.23 \end{frame}
  \begin{slide}
?

which was related with a fragile environment

\begin{frame}[fragile]
\frametitle{simulation in practice}
\begin{itemize}
\item For a given distribution $F$, call the corresponding 
pseudo-random generator in an arbitrary computer language
\begin{verbatim}
> x=rnorm(10)
> x
 [1] -0.021573 -1.134735  1.359812 -0.887579
 [7] -0.749418  0.506298  0.835791  0.472144
\end{verbatim}
\item use the sample as a statistician would
\begin{verbatim}
> mean(x)
[1] 0.004892123
> var(x)
[1] 0.8034657
\end{verbatim}
to approximate quantities related with $F$
\end{itemize}
\end{frame}\begin{frame}

but not directly the verbatim part: the reason for the bug was that the \end{frame} command did not have a line by itself! Which is one rare occurrence where the carriage return has an impact in LaTeX, as far as I know… (The same bug appears when there is an indentation at the beginning of the line. Weird!) [Another annoying feature is wordpress turning > into > in the sourcecode environment…]

my life as a mixture [slides]

Here are the slides of my talk today at the BAYSM’14 conference in Vienna. Mostly an overview of some of my papers on mixtures, with the most recent stuff…

JSM 2014, Boston [#3]

Today I gave a talk in the Advances in model selection session. Organised by Veronika Rockova and Ed George. (A bit of pre-talk stress: I actually attempted to change my slides at 5am and only managed to erase the current version! I thus left early enough to stop by the presentation room…) Here are the final slides, which have much in common with earlier versions, but also borrowed from Jean-Michel Marin’s talk in Cambridge. A posteriori, I think the talk missed one slide on the practical run of the ABC random forest algorithm, since later questions showed miscomprehension from the audience.

The other talks in this session were by Andreas Buja [whom I last met in Budapest last year] on valid post-modelling inference. A very relevant reflection on the fundamental bias in statistical modelling. Then by Nick Polson, about efficient ways to compute MAP for objective functions that are irregular.  Great entry into optimisation methods I had never heard of earlier.! (The abstract is unrelated.) And last but not least by Veronika Rockova, on mixing Indian buffet processes with spike-and-slab priors for factor analysis with unknown numbers of factors. A definitely advanced contribution to factor analysis, with a very nice idea of introducing a non-identifiable rotation to align on orthogonal designs. (Here too the abstract is unrelated, a side effect of the ASA requiring abstracts sent very long in advance.)

Although discussions lasted well into the following Bayesian Inference: Theory and Foundations session, I managed to listen to a few talks there. In particular, a talk by Keli Liu on constructing non-informative priors. A question of direct relevance. The notion of objectivity is to achieve a frequentist distribution of the Bayes factor associated with the point null that is constant. Or has a constant quantile at a given level. The second talk by Alexandra Bolotskikh related to older interests of mine’s, namely the construction of improved confidence regions in the spirit of Stein. (Not that surprising, given that a coauthor is Marty Wells, who worked with George and I on the topic.) A third talk by Abhishek Pal Majumder (jointly with Jan Hanning) dealt on a new type of fiducial distributions, with matching prior properties. This sentence popped a lot over the past days, but this is yet another area where I remain puzzled by the very notion. I mean the notion of fiducial distribution. Esp. in this case where the matching prior gets even closer to being plain Bayesian.

on alternative perspectives and solutions on Bayesian tests

Here are the slides of my tutorial at O’ Bayes 2013 today, a pot-pourri of various, recent and less recent, criticisms (with, albeit less than usual, a certain proportion of recycled slides):