# Statisfaction

## MCM’Ski lessons

Posted in Seminar/Conference by Pierre Jacob on 16 January 2014

A few days after the MCMSki conference, I start to see the main lessons gathered there.

1. I should really read the full program before attending the next MCMSki. The three parallel sessions looked consistently interesting, and I really regret having missed some talks (in particular Dawn Woodard‘s and Natesh Pillai‘s) and some posters as well (admittedly, due to exhaustion on my part).
2. Compared to the previous instance three years ago (in Utah), the main themes have significantly changed. Scalability, approximate methods, non-asymptotic results, 1/n methods … these keywords are now on everyone’s lips. Can’t wait to see if MCQMC’14 will feel that different from MCQMC’12.
3. The community is rightfully concerned about scaling Monte Carlo methods to big data, with some people pointing out that models should also be rethought in this new context.
4. The place of software developers in the conference, or simply references to software packages in the talks, is much greater than it used to be. It’s a very good sign towards reproducible research in our field. There’s still a lot of work to do, in particular in terms of making parallel computing easier to access (time to advertise LibBi a little bit). On a related note, many people now point out whether their proposed algorithms are parallel-friendly or not.
5. Going from the Rockies to the Alps, the food drastically changed from cheeseburgers to just melted cheese. Bread could be found but ground beef and Budweiser were reported missing.
6. It’s fun to have an international conference in your home country, but switching from French to English all the time was confusing.

Back in flooded Oxford now!

## Joint Statistical Meeting 2013

Posted in General, Seminar/Conference, Statistics by Pierre Jacob on 23 July 2013

A typical statistical meeting.

Hey,

In a few weeks (August 3-8) I’ll attend the Joint Statistical Meeting in Montréal, Canada. According to Wikipedia it’s been held every year since 1840 and now gathers more than 5,000 participants!

I’ll talk in a session organized by Scott Schmidler, entitled Adaptive Monte Carlo Methods for Bayesian Computation; you can find the session programme here [online program]. I’ll talk about score and Fisher observation matrix estimation in state-space models.

According to the rumour and Christian’s reflections on the past years (2009, 2010, 2011), I should prepare my schedule in advance to really enjoy this giant meeting. So if you want to meet there, please send me an e-mail!

See you in Montréal!

## Back from ISBA Regional Meeting in India

Posted in Seminar/Conference, Statistics by Pierre Jacob on 15 January 2013

Hello everyone,

and of course Happy New Year (2013 is the international year of statistics!).

Last week the ISBA Regional Meeting was held in Banaras / Varanasi, in the North of India. The conference was well attended, with leading figures such as Jayanta K. Ghosh, José Bernardo, James Berger, Peter Green, Christian Robert who blogged about it, and an overall ~350 participants.

## A glimps of Inverse Problems

Posted in General, Seminar/Conference, Statistics by JB Salomond on 15 November 2012

Hi folks !

Last Tuesday a seminar on Bayesian procedure for inverse problems took place at CREST. We had time for two presentations of young researchers Bartek Knapik and Kolyan Ray. Both presentations deal with the problem of observing a noisy version of a linear transform of the parameter of interest

$Y_i = K\mu + \frac{1}{\sqrt{n}} Z$
where $K$ is a linear operator and $Z$ a Gaussian white noise.  Both presentations considered asymptotic properties of the posterior distribution (Their papers can be found on arxiv, here for Bartek’s, and here for Kolyan’s). There is a wide literature on asymptotic properties of the posterior distribution in direc models. When looking at the concentration of $f$ toward a true distribution $f_0$  given the data, with respect to some distance $d(.,.)$,  well known problem is to derive concentration rates, that is the rate $\epsilon_n$ such that

$\pi(d(f,f_0) > \epsilon_n | X^n) \to 0.$

For inverse problems, the usual methods as introduced by Ghosal, Ghosh and van der Vaart (2000) usually fails, and thus results in this settings are in general difficult to obtain.

Bartek presented some very refined results in the conjugate case. He manages to get some results on the concentration rates of the posterior distribution, on Bayesian Credible Sets and Bernstein – Von Mises theorems – that states that the posterior is asymptotically Gaussian – when estimating a linear functional of the parameter of interest. Kolyan got some general conditions on the prior to achieve concentration rate, and prove that these techniques leads to optimal concentration rates for classical models.

I only knew little about inverse problems but both talks were very accessible and I will surely get more involved in this field !

## Recent Advances in Sequential Monte Carlo / Warwick 2012

Posted in General, Seminar/Conference by Pierre Jacob on 21 September 2012

Hello,

This blog is not dead! And it’s gonna get more active soon.

These last few days, a workshop on Sequential Monte Carlo methods was held in the University of Warwick (link to the webpage). It was a very exciting meeting, efficiently organised by Arnaud Doucet, Adam Johansen, Anthony Lee and Murray Pollock and hosted by CRiSM. For those who couldn’t attend, here’s a little summary of my experience (or more exactly, just a bunch of links). Since SMC methods are at the core of my research, I was logically interested by all the talks (which is exceptional for 3 days of workshop, filled with 30 talks!). It was probably a good time for a workshop on SMC, since there’s a lot of recent activity in the field. My impression is that this renewed interest is mainly due to:

The last point was illustrated at this workshop by a recent work from Alexandre Bouchard-Côté and colleagues called “Entangled Monte Carlo”, as well as by my own presentation: I talked about a new resampling scheme that avoids global interactions between all the particles, and resorts only to multiple pair-wise interactions. This is an on-going work with Pierre Del Moral, Anthony Lee, Lawrence Murray and Gareth Peters, that I might talk about again with more details in the future!

Cheers!

## Priors on probability measures

Posted in Seminar/Conference, Statistics by Julyan Arbel on 24 April 2012

Hi,

for the next GTB meeting at Crest, 3rd May, I will present Peter Orbanz‘ work on Projective limit random probabilities on Polish spaces. It will follow my previous presentation about Bayesian nonparametrics on the Dirichlet process.

The article provides a means of constructing any arbitrary prior distribution on the set of probability measures by working on its finite-dimensional marginals. The vanilla example is the Dirichlet process, which is characterized by its Dirichlet distribution marginals on any finite partition of the space (other examples are the Normalized Inverse Gaussian Process and the Pòlya Tree). The figure above illustrates the projective property of the marginals.

Peter will speak at ISBA 2012 Kyoto session : On the uses of random probabilities in Bayesian inference, along with Ramses Mena and Antonio Lijoi. I’ll write more about that later on!

## Awesome Bristol

Posted in Seminar/Conference by Pierre Jacob on 24 April 2012

Hey,

Last week there was a workshop on Confronting Intractability in Statistical Inference, organised by the University of Bristol and the SuSTain group. It was hosted at the Goldney Hall (picture above). It turned out to be a succession of fascinating talks about the recent developments and the future of statistical methods used in very challenging inference problems. What I appreciated above all was the ambition of many talks, and the generosity of the speakers in giving many ideas to the audience.

Among the things I’ve learned there, the following were the most ambitious in my opinion.

## Rochebrune Workshop 2012

Posted in General, Seminar/Conference by Julyan Arbel on 9 April 2012

Hey,
Last week I attended Rochebrune workshop for the second time. The genius organizers’ idea (Liliane Bel and Eric Parent from AgroParisTech, Jean-Jacques Borreux from Liège University) is to mix ski, stats and spirits (mostly Genepi and Chartreuse) around a remote alpine chalet on top of Megève ski resort.

Most of the attendees are (young) Bayesians working in applied fields, ranging from biology, ecology and epidemiology, to meteorology and climatology. We had great talks about fishes, trees, birds (Joël’s busard cendré), drugs and avalanches. More methodological talks dealt with extremes, Bayesian model averaging, and simulations: variational approximations, INLA, ABC, and MCMC in general. We had a tutorial about JAGS and WinBugs/OpenBugs as well (and how to interface them with R using rjags and R2WinBUGS). I presented my work about Multidimensional covariate dependent Dirichlet processes (all presentations here).

In addition to the 10 talks per day, a sacrosanct 5-hour skiing slot was reserved in the afternoon, with lessons from crazy Mégevan instructors. They must be really good: Pierre, don’t be afraid, I jumped and felt significantly less than two years ago. Have a Chartreuse, cheers!

## Next stop: Sydney

Posted in General, Seminar/Conference by Pierre Jacob on 11 February 2012

Hey hey,

After a very interesting week in the Department of Statistics and Applied Probability at the National University of Singapore, where I’ve started some projects about the mathematics behind Sequential Monte Carlo methods with the expert Ajay Jasra, I’m heading towards Sydney, Australia. I love my life at the moment!

Tip for the travelers among you: ScribTeX is a very convenient website if you travel without a laptop. You can type LaTeX documents online and also compile them, and see the resulting PDF. They seem to have all the necessary packages and I could easily type beamer presentations. The editor is a bit simple but it could still save your life!

Speaking of slides, I will be talking next Thursday at the MCQMC conference. My office mate Christian Schaefer will be there too if you wish to speak to an expert in SMC on binary spaces. As for me, I’ll be talking about the properties of the stochastic schedule in the Wang-Landau algorithm, linked with our recent article with Robin Ryder.

Then on February 20th, I’ll give an informal talk at the Centre for Language Science in Macquarie University. That’s quite random, yes. Many thanks to Mark Johnson who contacted me through the blog! There I’ll speak about recent advances in computational Bayesian statistics. These linguists already use SMC for word segmentation and show interest in the latest advances. I’ll hence talk about PMCMC/SMC^2 and also ABC.

Bye bye.

## Coming R meetings in Paris

Posted in R, Seminar/Conference by Julyan Arbel on 4 February 2012

If you live in Paris and are interested in R, there will be two meetings for you this week.

First a Semin-R session, organized at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle on Tuesday 7 Feb (too bad, the Museum is closed on Tuesdays). Presentations will be about colors, phylogenies and maps, while I will speak about (my beloved) RStudio. The slides of previous sessions can be found here (most of them are in French).

The following day, 8 Feb, a group of R users from INSEE will have its first meeting (13-14h, INSEE, room R12), about SQLite data in R, maps, and $\LaTeX$ in R.

I guess anyone can join!

UPDATE: Here is a colorful map to access INSEE $\tau R$. Come with an ID, and say you are visiting the meeting organizer Matthieu Cornec. Room R12 is on the ground floor (left).