The ICSDS 2024 meeting in Nice is quite impressive and not primarily because it is in Nice under a beautiful December sun. As other (numerous) IMS meetings I attended (since the initial one in Uppsala in 1990!), the program is of high quality and along topics that are currently moving fast or emerging. From the sessions I attended, e-values are strongly represented, although it remains unclear to me why they should constitute a major departure from p-values, as they stick to hypothesis testing, Type I error, power, and the whole paraphernalia of Neyman-Pearson formalism. If I manage to attend a BIRS workshop on the subject next Summer, I may manage to get a better e-derstanding!
The MCMC (only!) session included a presentation by Guanyang Wang that generalised different approximate MCMC schemes into a unified one. And one by Filippo Ascolani on Gibbs beating the competition! I also attended the Bayesian prediction session, where my friends Sonia Petrone and Chris Holmes have presentations on their respective Series B papers. I discussed both on the ‘Og, on 15 March 2023 and 07 November 2022, respectively. This time, I found that both talks had a Bayesian bootstrap flavour, which is not surprising when considering the non-parametric nature of the approach. And they left me wondering at it being protected from overfitting.
My only plenary session was Cynthia Dwork’s on outcome indistinguishability, which, while related to the privacy topics I was topic, remained somewhat obscure as to its purpose. Meaning I have to get through the paper to get a more holistic perspective.
Of course, Nice in Winter is a very nice place, with the waterfront available for running an uninterrupted 15km as we found out with Jérémie Houssineau (at a brisk 4’09” pace I had not planned before starting!) and the sea all for myself (for a dozen minutes before losing digits!). Unfortunately I had to skip the final day due to examinations of the Paris Dauphine MASH master. And miss Stan receiving a student award. But I am looking forward the next iterations of ICSDS. (Not including Copenhagen, Madrid and many many other places in 2025, since ICSDS seemed a most common name for conferences, some presumably predatory! The true location is Sevilla, to keep up with the Mediterranean theme of ICSDS!)
Archive for BIRS
Nice meeting!
Posted in pictures, R, Running, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags Approximate Bayesian computation, Bayesian bootstrap, Bayesian predictive, BIRS, Côte d'Azur, Chennai, Chennai Mathematical Institute, e-values, French Riviera, Gibbs sampling, hypothesis testing, ICSDS 2024, IMS, indistinguishability, Institute of Mathematical Statistics, Neyman-Pearson tests, Nice, open water swimming, p-values, predatory conferences, Promenade des Anglais, reproducible research, Uppsala, w on December 18, 2024 by xi'anJSM 2024, Portland, miniday 4
Posted in Books, pictures, Running, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags AI, American Statistical Association, ASA, Bayesian decision theory, Bayesian nonparametrics, Bayesian privacy, BIRS, British Columbia, classification, contextual integrity, data science, differential privacy, draw bridge, ERC, federated learning, generalised Bayesian inference, Joint Statistical Meeting, JSM 2024, Kelowna, Ocean, open water swimming, Oregon, Pacific North West, Portland, Seattle, United States of America, University of Washington, Willamette River on August 11, 2024 by xi'an
Final (half)day at JSM is always a sad thing as most people have left, people are busy dismantling booths and packing boxes, and the few remaining participants are fidgety and sitting on their suitcases (there may have been more suitcases than people in the main area that day!), cafés are minimally staffed or simply closed. Hence not the best time-slot to deliver one’s talk! Still, a few dozen people attended our session. The session topic was Bridge the Gap: Differential Privacy and Statistical Analysis, organised by Bei Jiang whom I met last summer in Kelowna, at a BIRS workshop on privacy. Where I spoke on setting up a complete decision-theoretic framework, as developed (and still in development) within our Ocean group, esp. Joshua Bon, Stan du Ché, and Judith Rousseau. (Rather than on the original plan of talking about convergence versus privacy, as a criticism of differential privacy.) The other talks were by Shurong Li, strongly set with differential privacy when record linkage is present, and Xuan Bi on a fully decentralised federated learning with local exchanges of global gradients that limit privacy leaks. (With a mention of gossip learning I hadn’t seen previously!)
I enjoyed even more the session due to Naisyin Wang giving a discussion on the three talks, in closes the particular because I had not seen her in years, if a few times since she was my teaching assistant in Cornell in a Bayesian decision theory class I was building on the spot (with Linda Zhao as a student!). Which nicely closes the loop given the topic of my talk, of which she was quite supportive! While calling for debiasing post-processing and wondering about a two-dimensional decision theoretic perspective rather than a unidimensional one under hard privacy constraints.
On the way out, after parting from the few friends remaining in the convention centre, I spotted the nearby (steel) bridge being raised, although I could not see the boat responsible for it. I had been unaware of this possibility while running over and under it, as well as swimming thrice under it. And we left Portland in the early afternoon, heading for Seattle and a celebration of Adrian Raftery’s career.
23w5106 [group picture]
Posted in Mountains, pictures, Travel, University life with tags BIRS, contextual integrity, differential privacy, group picture, Kelowna, Okanagan Valley, UBCO, workshop on August 27, 2023 by xi'an
sunrise and moonset on Lake Okanagan [jatp]
Posted in Mountains, pictures, Running, Travel with tags BIRS, British Columbia, Canada, jatp, Kelowna, Lake Okanagan, sunset, supermoon, UBCO, wildfire on August 8, 2023 by xi'an
Contextual Integrity for Differential Privacy #4 [23w5106]
Posted in Books, Mountains, pictures, Running, Statistics, Travel, University life, Wines with tags 100th birthday, Arrowleaf Cellars, Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation, BIRS, British Columbia, Canada, Canadian wines, contextual integrity, covidtracker, data analysis, differential privacy, ethics, full moon, GDPR, information theory, Kelowna, Lake Okanagan, large language models, natural language processing, Okanagan Valley, Okanagan vineyards, philosophy of sciences, replicability, synthetic data, UBCO, winery, workshop on August 5, 2023 by xi'an
Mostly short talks. First talk by Thomas Seinke (Google) on interpreting ε, with a side wondering of mine on the relation between exp(ε) and the uncertainty that comes with Monte Carlo outcome. Which may relate to this 2022 paper by Ruobin Gong. Second talk by Gautam Kamath (U Waterloo) on large language models under privacy with “public” data. Questioning the appropriateness of ML benchmarks in terms of privacy. Third talk by Mark Bun (Boston U) on replicability, privacy and adaptive generalisation in machine learning, with a strange criticism of confidence intervals on the same parameter not intersecting for two independent studies. And proposing high probability replicable algorithms that can be put in duality with differentially private algorithms at the cost of lowering precision and effective sample size. We also had another group discussion on how to reach out about privacy guarantees, which made me realise there were GDPR compliance software available.
In the afternoon session, Shlomi Hod (Boston U) presented a practical case of designing a privacy preserving protocol for the Israeli birth record. With a strong opposition from stakeholders to use synthetic data, due to a semantic drift from synthetic to manipulated to fake, to lying. Wanrong Zhang did not talk about her stunning recent ICML paper but instead of another practical case connected with mobile based Covid case predictions, by adding minimal noise to mobility data. Nidhi Hegde (U Alberta) gave up talking on Thomson sampling with privacy protection, to focus on an ongoing health application for Alberta as more suited for the workshop. And Ria Safavi-Naini (U Calgary) drew a parallel between information theory and DP versus CI.
While the workshop was scheduled till Friday noon, in usual BIRS habits (!), the morning session was cancelled for most people leaving Kelowna in the morning.
