Archive for Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation
BIRS building snapshot
Posted in Mountains, pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags Banff, Banff Centre, Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation, BIRS, Canada on March 8, 2014 by xi'an
Advances in scalable Bayesian computation [day #4]
Posted in Books, Mountains, pictures, R, Statistics, University life with tags Art Owen, Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation, Bayesian nonparametrics, Canada, Canadian Rockies, extremes, flu, influenza, low discrepancy sequences, MCMC algorithms, Norway, parallel processing, parallelisation, philogenic trees, quasi-random sequences, vaccine, viruses, Yin-Yang algorithm on March 7, 2014 by xi'an
Final day of our workshop Advances in Scalable Bayesian Computation already, since tomorrow morning is an open research time ½ day! Another “perfect day in paradise”, with the Banff Centre campus covered by a fine snow blanket, still falling…, and making work in an office of BIRS a dream-like moment.
Still looking for a daily theme, parallelisation could be the right candidate, even though other talks this week went into parallelisation issues, incl. Steve’s talk yesterday. Indeed, Anthony Lee gave a talk this morning on interactive sequential Monte Carlo, where he motivated the setting by a formal parallel structure. Then, Darren Wilkinson surveyed the parallelisation issues in Monte Carlo, MCMC, SMC and ABC settings, before arguing in favour of a functional language called Scala. (Neat entries to those topics can be found on Darren’s blog.) And in the afternoon session, Sylvia Frühwirth-Schnatter exposed her approach to the (embarrassingly) parallel problem, in the spirit of Steve’s , David Dunson’s and Scott’s (a paper posted on the day I arrived in Chamonix and hence I missed!). There was plenty to learn from that talk (do not miss the Yin-Yang moment at 25 mn!), but it also helped me to break a difficulty I had with the consensus Bayes representation for two weeks (more on that later!). And, even though Marc Suchard mostly talked about flu and trees in a very pleasant and broad talk, he also had a slide on parallelisation to fit the theme! Although unrelated with parallelism, Nicolas Chopin’s talk was on sequential quasi-Monte Carlo algorithms: while I had heard previous versions of this talk in Chamonix and BigMC, I found it full of exciting stuff. And it clearly got the room truly puzzled by this possibility, in a positive way! Similarly, Alex Lenkoski spoke about extreme rain events in Norway with no trace of parallelism, but the general idea behind the examples was to question the notion of the calibrated Bayesian (with possible connections with the cut models).
This has been a wonderful week and I am sure the participants got as much as I did from the talks and the informal exchanges. Thanks to BIRS for the sponsorship and the superb organisation of the week (and to the Banff Centre for providing such a paradisical environment). I feel very privileged to have benefited from this support, even though I deadly hope to be back in Banff within a few years.
Advances in scalable Bayesian computation [day #3]
Posted in Books, Mountains, pictures, R, Statistics, University life with tags ads, Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation, Bayesian nonparametrics, Canada, Canadian Rockies, climbing, curling, Facebook, Google, image classification, machine learning on March 6, 2014 by xi'anWe have now gone over the midpoint of our workshop Advances in Scalable Bayesian Computation with three talks in the morning and an open research or open air afternoon. (Maybe surprisingly I chose to stay indoors and work on a new research topic rather than trying cross-country skiing!) If I must give a theme for the day, it would be (jokingly) corporate Big data, as the three speakers spoke of problems and solutions connected with Google, Facebook and similar companies. First, Russ Salakhutdinov presented some hierarchical structures on multimedia data, like connecting images and text, with obvious applications on Google. The first part described Boltzman machines with impressive posterior simulations of characters and images. (Check the video at 45:00.) Then Steve Scott gave us a Google motivated entry to embarrassingly parallel algorithms, along the lines of papers recently discussed on the ‘Og. (Too bad we forgot to start the video at the very beginning!) One of the novel things in the talk (for me) was the inclusion of BART in this framework, with the interesting feature that using the whole prior on each machine was way better than using a fraction of the prior, as predicted by the theory! And Joaquin Quinonero Candela provided examples of machine learning techniques used by Facebook to suggest friends and ads in a most efficient way (techniques remaining hidden!).
Even though the rest of the day was free, the two hours of exercising between the pool in the early morning and the climbing wall in the late afternoon left me with no energy to experiment curling with a large subsample of the conference attendees, much to my sorrow!
beer at BIRS
Posted in Mountains, Travel, Wines with tags ale, Banff, Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation, beer, BIRS, Canadian Rockies, Canmore, Oberwolfach on March 6, 2014 by xi'an
Advances in scalable Bayesian computation [day #2]
Posted in Books, Mountains, pictures, R, Statistics, University life with tags Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation, Bayesian nonparametrics, Canada, Canadian Rockies, cherry tree, Elements of Statistical Learning, finite mixtures, fMRI, Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, histogram, image analysis, particle Gibbs sampler on March 5, 2014 by xi'anAnd here is the second day of our workshop Advances in Scalable Bayesian Computation gone! This time, it sounded like the “main” theme was about brains… In fact, Simon Barthelmé‘s research originated from neurosciences, while Dawn Woodard dissected a brain (via MRI) during her talk! (Note that the BIRS website currently posts Simon’s video as being Dan Simpson’s talk, the late change in schedule being due to Dan most unfortunately losing his passport during a plane transfer and most unfortunately being prevented from attending…) I found Simon’s talk quite inspiring, with this Tibshirani et al.’s trick of using logistic regression to estimate densities as a classification problem central to the method and suggesting a completely different vista for handling normalising constants… Then Raazesh Sainudiin gave a detailed explanation and validation of his approach to density estimation by multidimensional pavings/histograms, with a tree representation allowing for fast merging of different estimators. Raaz had given a preliminary version of the talk at CREST last Fall, which helped with focussing on the statistical aspects of the method. Chris Strickland then exposed an image analysis of flooded Northern Queensland landscapes, using a spatio-temporal model with changepoints and about 18,000 parameters. still managing to get an efficiency of O(np) thanks to two tricks. Then it was time for the group photograph outside in a balmy -18⁰ and an open research time that was quite profitable.
In the afternoon sessions, Paul Fearnhead presented an auxiliary variable approach to particle Gibbs, which again opened new possibilities for handling state-space models, but also reminding me of Xiao-Li Meng’s reparameterisation devices. And making me wonder (out loud) whether or not the SMC algorithm was that essential in a static setting, since the sequence could be explored in any possible order for a fixed time horizon. Then Emily Fox gave a 2-for-1 talk, mostly focussing on the first talk, where she introduced a new technique for approximating the gradient in Hamiltonian (or Hockey!) Monte Carlo, using second order Langevin. She did not have much time for the second talk, which intersected with the one she gave at BNP’ski in Chamonix, but focussed on a notion of sandwiched slice sampling where the target density only needs bounds that can get improved if needed. A cool trick! And the talks ended with Dawn Woodard‘s analysis of time varying 3-D brain images towards lesion detection, through an efficient estimation of a spatial mixture of normals.
