special issue of Entropy

abandon ship [value]!!!

The Abandon Statistical Significance paper we wrote with Blakeley B. McShane, David Gal, Andrew Gelman, and Jennifer L. Tackett has now appeared in a special issue of The American Statistician, “Statistical Inference in the 21st Century: A World Beyond p < 0.05“.  A 400 page special issue with 43 papers available on-line and open-source! Food for thought likely to be discussed further here (and elsewhere). The paper and the ideas within have been discussed quite a lot on Andrew’s blog and I will not repeat them here, simply quoting from the conclusion of the paper

In this article, we have proposed to abandon statistical significance and offered recommendations for how this can be implemented in the scientific publication process as well as in statistical decision making more broadly. We reiterate that we have no desire to “ban” p-values or other purely statistical measures. Rather, we believe that such measures should not be thresholded and that, thresholded or not, they should not take priority over the currently subordinate factors.

Which also introduced in a comment by Valentin Amrhein, Sander Greenland, and Blake McShane published in Nature today (and supported by 800+ signatures). Again discussed on Andrew’s blog.

Charlie Hebdo [still running]

Statistics and Computing special issue on BNP

[verbatim from the call for papers:]

Statistics and Computing is preparing a special issue on Bayesian Nonparametrics, for publication by early 2016. We invite researchers to submit manuscripts for publication in the special issue. We expect that the focus theme will increase the visibility and impact of papers in the volume.

By making use of infinite-dimensional mathematical structures, Bayesian nonparametric statistics allows the complexity of a learned model to grow as the size of a data set grows. This flexibility can be particularly suited to modern data sets but can also present a number of computational and modelling challenges. In this special issue, we will showcase novel applications of Bayesian nonparametric models, new computational tools and algorithms for learning these models, and new models for the diverse structures and relations that may be present in data.

To submit to the special issue, please use the Statistics and Computing online submission system. To indicate consideration for the special issue, choose “Special Issue: Bayesian Nonparametrics” as the article type. Papers must be prepared in accordance with the Statistics and Computing journal guidelines.

Papers will go through the usual peer review process. The special issue website will be updated with any relevant deadlines and information.

Deadline for manuscript submission: August 20, 2015

Guest editors:
Tamara Broderick (MIT)
Katherine Heller (Duke)
Peter Mueller (UT Austin)

Statistics and Computing special MCMSk’issue [call for papers]

Following the exciting and innovative talks, posters and discussions at MCMski IV, the editor of Statistics and Computing, Mark Girolami (who also happens to be the new president-elect of the BayesComp section of ISBA, which is taking over the management of future MCMski meetings), kindly proposed to publish a special issue of the journal open to all participants to the meeting. Not only to speakers, mind, but to all participants.

So if you are interested in submitting a paper to this special issue of a computational statistics journal that is very close to our MCMski themes, I encourage you to do so. (Especially if you missed the COLT 2014 deadline!) The deadline for submissions is set on March 15 (a wee bit tight but we would dearly like to publish the issue in 2014, namely the same year as the meeting.) Submissions are to be made through the Statistics and Computing portal, with a mention that they are intended for the special issue.

An editorial committee chaired by Antonietta Mira and composed of Christophe Andrieu, Brad Carlin, Nicolas Chopin, Jukka Corander, Colin Fox, Nial Friel, Chris Holmes, Gareth Jones, Peter Müller, Antonietta Mira, Geoff Nicholls, Gareth Roberts, Håvård Rue, Robin Ryder, and myself, will examine the submissions and get back within a few weeks to the authors. In a spirit similar to the JRSS Read Paper procedure, submissions will first be examined collectively, before being sent to referees. We plan to publish the reviews as well, in order to include a global set of comments on the accepted papers. We intend to do it in The Economist style, i.e. as a set of edited anonymous comments. Usual instructions for Statistics and Computing apply, with the additional requirements that the paper should be around 10 pages and include at least one author who took part in MCMski IV.