Xi'an's Og

We received the good news from the Program Committee of the next ISBA World meeting in Cancún, Quintana Roo, México, that our proposal of a short course on ABC methods was accepted. So, along with Jean-Michel Marin, I hope to introduce ABC to a large group of interested participants on either July 13 or the morn of July 14. Here is the abstract for the short course

ABC appeared in 1999 to solve complex genetic problems where the likelihood of the model was impossible to compute. They are now a standard tool in the statistical genetic community but have also addressed many other problems where likelihood computation was also an issue, including dynamic models in signal processing and financial data analysis. However, these methods suffer to some degree from calibration difficulties that make them rather volatile in their implementation and thus render them suspicious to the users of more traditional Monte Carlo methods. Nonetheless, ABC techniques have several claims to validity: first, they are connected with econometric methods like indirect inference. Second, they can be expressed in terms of various non-parametric estimators of the likelihood or of the posterior density and follow standard convergence patterns. At last, they appear as regular Bayesian inference over noisy data. The lectures cover those validation steps but also detail the different implementations of ABC algorithms and the calibration of their parameters. The second part of the course illustrates those issues in the special case of the coalescent model used in population genetics, where many of the early advances of ABC were first implemented.

and the complete description is available on the ISBA website.

In addition, the special ISBA section sessions for BayesComp and O’Bayes ISBA sections have been accepted too. (As well as sessions for most of the other ISBA sections.) Thanks to Raquel Prado and to the whole scientific committee for working hard towards another successful ISBA World meeting! Note that the early bird conference registration begins today, so make sure to book your seat for Cancun!

This entry was posted on November 15, 2013 at 12:13 am and is filed under Statistics, Travel, University life with tags ABC, Cancún, conference, deadline, ISBA, ISBA sections, logo, Mexico, objective Bayes, short courses, Valencia conferences, Yucatan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.