As emailed to me by Aki Vehtari, the next StanCon will take place this summer in the wonderful city of Helsinki, at the end of August. On Aalto University Töölö Campus precisely. The list of speakers and tutorial teachers is available on the webpage. (The only “negative point” is that the conference does not include a Tuesday, the night of the transcendence 2 miles race!) Somewhat concluding this never-ending summer of Bayesian conferences!
Archive for Helsinki
StanCon in Helsinki [29-31 Aug 2018]
Posted in Books, pictures, R, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags Aalto Science Institute, Baltic Sea, Bayesian Analysis, Bayesian conference, Finland, Helsinki, STAN, StanCon 2018, summer on March 7, 2018 by xi'anABC gas
Posted in pictures, Running, Travel with tags ABC, ABC in Helsinki, brands, Finland, gas station, Helsinki, Munkkiniemen, tramways on August 9, 2017 by xi'an
European statistics in Finland [EMS17]
Posted in Books, pictures, Running, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags ABC, AISTATS 2016, Amazon, AMIS, Bayesian optimisation, deterministic mixtures, EMS 2017, Europe, European Meeting of Statisticians, exact Monte Carlo, Helsinki, INLA, particle filters, probabilistic numerics, University of Helsinki on August 2, 2017 by xi'an
While this European meeting of statisticians had a wide range of talks and topics, I found it to be more low key than the previous one I attended in Budapest, maybe because there was hardly any talk there in applied probability. (But there were some sessions in mathematical statistics and Mark Girolami gave a great entry to differential geometry and MCMC, in the spirit of his 2010 discussion paper. Using our recent trip to Montréal as an example of geodesic!) In the Bayesian software session [organised by Aki Vetahri], Javier Gonzáles gave a very neat introduction to Bayesian optimisation: he showed how optimisation can be turned into Bayesian inference or more specifically as a Bayesian decision problem using a loss function related to the problem of interest. The point in following a Bayesian path [or probabilist numerics] is to reduce uncertainty by the medium of prior measures on functions, although resorting [as usual] to Gaussian processes whose arbitrariness I somehow dislike within the infinity of priors (aka stochastic processes) on functions! One of his strong arguments was that the approach includes the possibility for design in picking the next observation point (as done in some ABC papers of Michael Guttman and co-authors, incl. the following talk at EMS 2017) but again the devil may be in the implementation when looking at minimising an objective function… The notion of the myopia of optimisation techniques was another good point: only looking one step ahead in the future diminishes the returns of the optimisation and an alternative presented at AISTATS 2016 [that I do not remember seeing in Càdiz] goes against this myopia.
Umberto Piccini also gave a talk on exploiting synthetic likelihoods in a Bayesian fashion (in connection with the talk he gave last year at MCqMC 2016). I wondered at the use of INLA for this Gaussian representation, as well as at the impact of the parameterisation of the summary statistics. And the session organised by Jean-Michel involved Jimmy Olson, Murray Pollock (Warwick) and myself, with great talks from both other speakers, on PaRIS and PaRISian algorithms by Jimmy, and on a wide range of exact simulation methods of continuous time processes by Murray, both managing to convey the intuition behind their results and avoiding the massive mathematics at work there. By comparison, I must have been quite unclear during my talk since someone interrupted me about how Owen & Zhou (2000) justified their deterministic mixture importance sampling representation. And then left when I could not make sense of his questions [or because it was lunchtime already].
Helsingin satama ja katedraali [jatp]
Posted in pictures, Running, Travel, University life with tags Baltic Sea, boats, EMS 2017, Finland, Gulf of Bothnia, Helsinki, jatp, orthodox cathedral, sunrise on July 27, 2017 by xi'an
Self-Transcendence 2 mile races in Helsinki
Posted in Running, Travel, University life with tags 2 miles, 6 minutes mile, EMS 2017, Finland, Helsinki, Hinduism, Munkkiniemen, road race, self-transcendence, Sri Chinmoy, Sri Chinmoy Marathon, tramways on July 26, 2017 by xi'an
Upon our arrival in Helsinki for EMS 2017, Jean-Michel Marin pointed out to me the existence of a 2 miles race the next day [as every Tuesday], indicated on the webpage of the conference. And encouraged me to run it. As I had brought my running gear and did not need preparation for a 2 miles [a mere loop in the parc!], I decided to try the race and we took a tram all the way to a faraway suburb where a few other runners had gathered. It was very relaxed and friendly, with recyclable cloth bibs and free juice available. Against all odds, I managed to win the race, with a first mile under six minutes thanks to another runner rushing me. And got a tee shirt as a reward. (Checking on Wikipedia later, I found that Sri Chinmoy was an Indian guru advocating running as a form of meditation, which I find rather absurd as I am anything but meditating when running a race..!)
