# Statisfaction

## Reading Bayesian classics — presentations

Posted in General by Julyan Arbel on 21 April 2015

The students did a great job in presenting some Bayesian classics. I enjoyed reading the papers (pdfs can be found here), most of which I hadn’t read before, and enjoyed also the students’ talks. I share here some of the best ones, as well as some demonstrative excerpts from the papers. In chronological order (presentations on slideshare below):

• W. Keith Hastings. Monte Carlo sampling methods using Markov chains and their applications. Biometrika, 57(1):97–109, 1970.

In this paper, we shall consider Markov chain methods of sampling that are generalizations of a method proposed by Metropolis et al. (1953), which has been used extensively for numerical problems in statistical mechanics.

• Dennis V. Lindley and Adrian F.M. Smith. Bayes estimates for the linear model. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B (Statistical Methodology), with discussion, 1–41, 1972.

From Prof. B. de Finetti discussion (note the valliant collaborator Smith!):

I think that the main point to stress about this interesting and important paper is its significance for the philosophical questions underlying the acceptance of the Bayesian standpoint as the true foundation for inductive reasoning, and in particular for statistical inference. So far as I can remember, the present paper is the first to emphasize the role of the Bayesian standpoint as a logical framework for the analysis of intricate statistical situation. […] I would like to express my warmest congratulations to my friend Lindley and his valiant collaborator Smith.

## Statistics journals network

Posted in General, R, Statistics by Julyan Arbel on 16 April 2015

Statistical journals friendship (clic for SVG format)

Xian blogged recently on the incoming RSS read paper: Statistical Modelling of Citation Exchange Between Statistics Journals, by Cristiano Varin, Manuela Cattelan and David Firth. Following the last JRSS B read paper by one of us! The data that are used in the paper (and can be downloaded here) are quite fascinating for us, academics fascinated by academic rankings, for better or for worse (ironic here). They consist in cross citations counts $C = (C_{ij})$ for 47 statistics journals (see list and abbreviations page 5): $C_{ij}$ is the number of citations from articles published in journal $j$ in 2010 to papers published in journal $i$ in the 2001-2010 decade. The choice of the list of journals is discussed in the paper. Major journals missing include Bayesian Analysis (published from 2006), The Annals of Applied Statistics (published from 2007).

I looked at the ratio of Total Citations Received by Total Citations made. This is a super simple descriptive statistic which happen to look rather similar to Figure 4 which plots Export Scores from Stigler model (can’t say more about it, I haven’t read in detail). The top five is the same modulo the swap between Annals of Statistics and Biometrika. Of course a big difference is that the Cited/Citation ratio isn’t endowed with a measure of uncertainty (below, left is my making, right is Fig. 4 in the paper).

I was surprised not to see a graph / network representation of the data in the paper. As it happens I wanted to try the gephi software for drawing graphs, used for instance by François Caron and Emily Fox in their sparse graphs paper. I got the above graph, where:

• for the data, I used the citations matrix $C$ renormalized by the total number of citations made, which I denote by $\tilde C$. This is a way to account for the size (number of papers published) of the journal. This is just a proxy though since the actual number of papers published by the journal is not available in the data. Without that correction, CSDA is way ahead of all the others.
• the node size represents the Cited/Citing ratio
• the edge width represents the renormalized $\tilde C_{ij}$. I’m unsure of what gephi does here, since it converts my directed graph into an undirected graph. I suppose that it displays only the largest of the two edges $\tilde C_{ij}$ and $\tilde C_{ji}$.
• for a better visibility I kept only the first decile of heaviest edges.
• the clusters identified by four colors are modularity classes obtained by the Louvain method.

Some remarks

The two software journals included in the dataset are quite outliers:

• the Journal of Statistical Software (JSS) is disconnected from the others, meaning it has no normalized citations $\tilde C_{ij}$ in the first decile. Except from its self citations which are quite big and make it the 4th Impact Factor from the total list in 2010 (and apparently the first in 2015).
• the largest $\tilde C_{ij}$ is the self citations of the STATA Journal (StataJ).

Centrality:

• CSDA is the most central journal in the sense of the highest (unweighted) degree.

Some further thoughts

All that is just for the fun of it. As mentioned by the authors, citation counts are heavy-tailed, meaning that just a few papers account for much of the citations of a journal while most of the papers account for few citations. As a matter of fact, the total of citations received is mostly driven by a few super-cited papers, and also is the Cited/Citations matrix $\tilde C$ that I use throughout for building the graph. A reason one could put forward about why JRSS B makes it so well is the read papers: for instance, Spiegelhalter et al. (2002), DIC, received alone 11.9% of all JRSS B citations in 2010. Who’d bet the number of citation this new read paper (JRSS A though) will receive?

## Bayesian classics

Posted in Statistics by Julyan Arbel on 17 March 2015

Collegio Carlo Alberto in a sunny day

This week I’ll start my Bayesian Statistics master’s course at the Collegio Carlo Alberto. I realized that some of last year students got PhD positions in prestigious US universities. So I thought that letting this year’s students have a first grasp of some great Bayesian papers wouldn’t do harm. The idea is that in addition to the course, the students will pick a paper from a list and present it (or rather part of it) to the others and to me. Which will let them earn some extra points for the final exam mark. It’s in the spirit of Xian’s Reading Classics Seminar (his list here).

I’ve made up the list below, inspired by two textbooks references lists and biased by personal tastes: Xian’s Bayesian Choice and Peter Hoff’s First Course in Bayesian Statistical Methods. See the pdf list and zipped folder for papers. Comments on the list are much welcome!

Julyan

PS: reference n°1 isn’t a joke!

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## [Meta-]Blogging as young researchers

Posted in General, Statistics by Pierre Jacob on 11 December 2014

Hello all,

This is an article intended for the ISBA bulletin, jointly written by us all at Statisfaction, Rasmus Bååth from Publishable Stuff, Boris Hejblum from Research side effects, Thiago G. Martins from tgmstat@wordpress, Ewan Cameron from Another Astrostatistics Blog and Gregory Gandenberger from gandenberger.org

Inspired by established blogs, such as the popular Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science or Xi’an’s Og, each of us began blogging as a way to diarize our learning adventures, to share bits of R code or LaTeX tips, and to advertise our own papers and projects. Along the way we’ve come to a new appreciation of the world of academic blogging: a never-ending international seminar, attended by renowned scientists and anonymous users alike. Here we share our experiences by weighing the pros and cons of blogging from the point of view of young researchers.

## Unfortunate typos in read paper

Posted in General by nicolaschopin on 3 December 2014

Mathieu and I have just realised that the version of our SQMC paper made available on the RSS web site contains several unfortunate typos. In particular, the symbol for “small o” has been replaced by a “big O” by editors. For instance, Theorem 9 should state the QMC beats standard SMC; i.e. the MSE (mean square error) of an SQMC estimator is

$\mathrm{MSE} = o(N^{-1})$

$\mathrm{MSE} = O(N^{-1})$.

Well, that’s a bummer. For now, I recommend anyone to read instead the arxiv version (updated on Monday).

Posted in General by nicolaschopin on 29 October 2014

Another way to generate random particles

Almost 10 months since my latest post? I guess bloggin’ ain’t my thing… In my defense, Mathieu Gerber and I were quite busy revising our SQMC paper. I am happy to announce that it has just been accepted as a read paper in JRSSB. If all goes as planned, we should present the paper at  the RSS ordinary meeting on Dec 10. Everybody is welcome to attend, and submit an oral or written discussion (or both). More details soon, when the event is officially announced on the RSS web-site.

What is SQMC? It is a QMC (Quasi-Monte Carlo) version of particle filtering. For the same CPU cost, it typically generates much more accurate estimators. Interested? consider reading the paper here (more recent version coming soon), checking this video where I present SQMC, or, even better, attending our talk in London!

## momentify R package at BAYSM14

Posted in General, R, Seminar/Conference, Statistics by Julyan Arbel on 20 September 2014

I presented an arxived paper of my postdoc at the big success Young Bayesian Conference in Vienna. The big picture of the talk is simple: there are situations in Bayesian nonparametrics where you don’t know how to sample from the posterior distribution, but you can only compute posterior expectations (so-called marginal methods). So e.g. you cannot provide credible intervals. But sometimes all the moments of the posterior distribution are available as posterior expectations. So morally, you should be able to say more about the posterior distribution than just reporting the posterior mean. To be more specific, we consider a hazard (h) mixture model

$\displaystyle h(t)=\int k(t;y)\mu(dy)$

where $k$ is a kernel, and the mixing distribution $\mu$ is random and discrete (Bayesian nonparametric approach).

We consider the survival function $S$ which is recovered from the hazard rate $h$ by the transform

$\displaystyle S(t)=\exp\Big(-\int_0^t h(s)ds\Big)$

and some possibly censored survival data having survival $S$. Then it turns out that all the posterior moments of the survival curve $S(t)$ evaluated at any time $t$ can be computed.

The nice trick of the paper is to use the representation of a distribution in a [Jacobi polynomial] basis where the coefficients are linear combinations of the moments. So one can sample from [an approximation of] the posterior, and with a posterior sample we can do everything! Including credible intervals.

I’ve wrapped up the few lines of code in an R package called momentify (not on CRAN). With a sequence of moments of a random variable supported on [0,1] as an input, the package does two things:

• evaluates the approximate density
• samples from it

A package example for a mixture of beta and 2 to 7 moments gives that result:

## Non-negative unbiased estimators

Posted in Statistics by Pierre Jacob on 13 May 2014

Benedict has to choose between unbiasedness and non-negativity.

Hey hey,

With Alexandre Thiéry we’ve been working on non-negative unbiased estimators for a while now. Since I’ve been talking about it at conferences and since we’ve just arXived the second version of the article, it’s time for a blog post. This post is kind of a follow-up of a previous post from July, where I was commenting on Playing Russian Roulette with Intractable Likelihoods by Mark Girolami, Anne-Marie Lyne, Heiko Strathmann, Daniel Simpson, Yves Atchade.

## Parallel resampling in the particle filter

Posted in Statistics by Pierre Jacob on 12 May 2014

Decisions decisions… which resampling to use on the CPU (left), GPU (middle), or between both (right). The y-axis essentially parametrizes the expected variance of the weights (high values = “we observe an outlier” = high variance of the weights).

Hey there,

It’s been a while I haven’t written about parallelization and GPUs. With colleagues Lawrence Murray and Anthony Lee we have just arXived a new version of Parallel resampling in the particle filter. The setting is that, on modern computing architectures such as GPUs, thousands of operations can be performed in parallel (i.e. simultaneously) and therefore the rest of the calculations that cannot be parallelized quickly becomes the bottleneck. In the case of the particle filter (or any sequential Monte Carlo method such as SMC samplers), that bottleneck is the resampling step. The article investigates this issue and numerically compares different resampling schemes.

## Moustache target distribution and Wes Anderson

Posted in Art, Geek, R by Pierre Jacob on 31 March 2014

Today I am going to introduce the moustache target distribution (moustarget distribution for brievety). Load some packages first.

library(wesanderson) # on CRAN
library(RShapeTarget) # available on https://github.com/pierrejacob/RShapeTarget/
library(PAWL) # on CRAN


Let’s invoke the moustarget distribution.

 shape <- create_target_from_shape(
file_name=system.file(package = "RShapeTarget", "extdata/moustache.svg"),
lambda=5)
rinit <- function(size) matrix(rnorm(2*size), ncol = 2)
moustarget <- target(name = "moustache", dimension = 2,
rinit = rinit, logdensity = shape$logd, parameters = shape$algo_parameters)


This defines a target distribution represented by a SVG file using RShapeTarget. The target probability density function is defined on $\mathbb{R}^2$ and is proportional to $1$ on the segments described in the SVG files, and decreases exponentially fast to $0$ away from the segments. The density function of the moustarget is plotted below, a picture being worth a thousand words.