Bayesian restricted likelihood with insufficient statistic [slides]

A great Bayesian Analysis webinar this afternoon with well-balanced presentations by Steve MacEachern and John Lewis, and original discussions by Bertrand Clarke and Fabrizio Rugieri. Which attracted 122 participants. I particularly enjoyed Bertrand’s points that likelihoods were more general than models [made in 6 different wordings!] and that this paper was closer to the M-open perspective. I think I eventually got the reason why the approach could be seen as an ABC with ε=0, since the simulated y’s all get the right statistic, but this presentation does not bring a strong argument in favour of the restricted likelihood approach, when considering the methodological and computational effort. The discussion also made me wonder if tools like VAEs could be used towards approximating the distribution of T(y) conditional on the parameter θ. This is also an opportunity to thank my friend Michele Guindani for his hard work as Editor of Bayesian Analysis and in particular for keeping the discussion tradition thriving!

the many nuances of Bayesian testing [CERminar]

[de]quarantined by slideshare

A follow-up episode to the SlideShare m’a tuer [sic] saga: After the 20 November closure of my xianblog account and my request for an explanation, I was told by Linkedin that a complaint has been made about one of my talks for violation of copyright. Most surprisingly, at least at first, it was about the slides for the graduate lectures I gave ten years ago at CREST on (re)reading Jaynes’ Probability Theory. While the slides contain a lot of short quotes from the Logic of Science, somewhat necessarily since I discuss the said book, there are also many quotes from Jeffreys’ Theory of Probability and “t’is but a scratch” on the contents of this lengthy book… Plus, the pdf file appears to be accessible on several sites, including one with an INRIA domain. Since I had to fill a “Counter-Notice of Copyright Infringement” to unlock the rest of the depository, I just hope no legal action is going to be taken about this lecture. But I remain puzzled at the reasoning behind the complaint, unwilling to blame radical Jaynesians for it! As an aside, here are the registered 736 views of the slides for the past year:

quarantined by slideshare

Just found out that SlideShare has closed my account for “violating SlideShare Terms of Service”! As I have no further detail (and my xianblog account is inaccessible) I have contacted SlideShare to get an explanation for this inexplicable cancellation and hopefully (??) can argue my case. If not the hundred plus slide presentations that were posted there and linked on the ‘Og will become unavailable. I seem to remember this happened to me once before so maybe there is hope to invert the decision presumably made by an AI using the wrong prior or algorithm!

my talk in Newcastle

I will be talking (or rather zooming) at the statistics seminar at the University of Newcastle this afternoon on the paper Component-wise approximate Bayesian computation via Gibbs-like steps that just got accepted by Biometrika (yay!). Sadly not been there for real, as I would have definitely enjoyed reuniting with friends and visiting again this multi-layered city after discovering it for the RSS meeting of 2013, which I attended along with Jim Hobert and where I re-discussed the re-Read DIC paper. Before traveling south to Warwick to start my new appointment there. (I started with a picture of Seoul taken from the slopes of Gwanaksan about a year ago as a reminder of how much had happened or failed to happen over the past year…Writing 2019 as the year was unintentional but reflected as well on the distortion of time induced by the lockdowns!)