Bayesian Methods for the Social Sciences [and for the Parisians]

[Reposting the announcement of a Bayesian conference in Paris, next October, with a fabulous list of friends speakers! Note that this is the week prior to our Fusion workshop at CIRM, Marseille. And to BNP.]

This three-day workshop will gather statisticians, mathematicians and social scientists around the theme of Bayesian statistical methods for the social sciences. This area has been growing rapidly in the past decade, and the speakers will include some of the leading researchers in the area from around the World.

The first day will consist of tutorial introductions to Bayesian inference, demography and social network analysis. Days 2 and 3 will consist of talks and posters on cutting-edge research in the area. The workshop is sponsored by the Fondation des Sciences Mathématiques de Paris (FSMP), and the tutorial sessions are organised jointly with the French Institute of Mathematics for Planet Earth.

It will be held in person at the Institut Henri Poincaré in Paris from October 19 to 21, 2022.

me no savi [travel madness]

Today, I left home in the wee hours, after watering my tomatoes!, quite excited to join the Safe, Anytime-Valid Inference (SAVI) workshop in Eindhoven, which was taking place after two years of postponement. I alas did not check the state of the train traffic beforehand and when I reached the train station I found that part of the line to De Gaulle airport was closed, due to some control cables being stolen last night. Things quickly deteriorated as the train management in Gare du Nord was pretty inefficient, meaning that the trains would stop for five minutes at each station, and that there was no rail alternative to reach Roissy. The taxi stand was a complete mess, with no queue whatsoever, and the Parisian taxis kept true to their reputation, by refusing to take people to the airport, asking for outrageous prices (60 euros per passenger), and stopping anywhere. I almost managed to get one but he refused to take me on top of the Swede family I had directed to this stand from the RER train, and this was simply my last opportunity. Über taxis were invisible and I soon realised I could not catch my flight. Later flights were outrageously expensive and there was not train seat whatsoever till the day after, so I gave up and returned home from this trip to nowhere…

Foundations of objective Bayesian methodology [21w5107]

After years in the making (!), our BIRS-CMO workshop on the foundations of O’Bayes is at last taking place! In an hybrid format as BIRS-CMO is restricting the attendance to 15 people on site, instead of the customary (i.e., pre-COVID) 35. Still, it is quite exciting to join this workshop and the friends who will gather in Mexico or on-line to discuss objective Bayesian tools and prospects. And of course to visit for the second time the city of Oaxaca, its temples and markets! (Hopefully managing the stray dogs when running. If running.)

more of Sugiton at dawn [jatp]

ISBA 2021 grand finale

Last day of ISBA (and ISB@CIRM), or maybe half-day, since there are only five groups of sessions we can attend in Mediterranean time.

My first session was one on priors for mixtures, with 162⁺ attendees at 5:15am! (well, at 11:15 Wien or Marseille time), Gertrud Malsiner-Walli distinguishing between priors on number of components [in the model] vs number of clusters [in the data], with a minor question of mine whether or not a “prior” is appropriate for a data-dependent quantity. And Deborah Dunkel presenting [very early in the US!] anchor models for fighting label switching, which reminded me of the talk she gave at the mixture session of JSM 2018 in Vancouver. (With extensions to consistency and mixtures of regression.) And Clara Grazian debating on objective priors for the number of components in a mixture [in the Sydney evening], using loss functions to build these. Overall it seems there were many talks on mixtures and clustering this year.

After the lunch break, when several ISB@CIRM were about to leave, we ran the Objective Bayes contributed session, which actually included several Stein-like minimaxity talks. Plus one by Théo Moins from the patio of CIRM, with ciccadas in the background. Incredibly chaired by my friend Gonzalo, who had a question at the ready for each and every speaker! And then the Savage Awards II session. Which ceremony is postponed till Montréal next year. And which nominees are uniformly impressive!!! The winner will only be announced in September, via the ISBA Bulletin. Missing the ISBA general assembly for a dinner in Cassis. And being back for the Bayesian optimisation session.

I would have expected more talks at the boundary of BS & ML (as well as COVID and epidemic decision making), the dearth of which should be a cause for concern if researchers at this boundary do not prioritise ISBA meetings over more generic meetings like NeurIPS… (An exception was George Papamakarios’ talk on variational autoencoders in the Savage Awards II session.)

Many many thanks to the group of students at UConn involved in setting most of the Whova site and running the support throughout the conference. It indeed went on very smoothly and provided a worthwhile substitute for the 100% on-site version. Actually, I both hope for the COVID pandemic (or at least the restrictions attached to it) to abate and for the hybrid structure of meetings to stay, along with the multiplication of mirror workshops. Being together is essential to the DNA of conferences, but travelling to a single location is not so desirable, for many reasons. Looking for ISBA 2022, a year from now, either in Montréal, Québec, or in one of the mirror sites!