Archive for ISI
on(-line) integral priors for model selection
Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags Bayes factor, Bayesian model selection, collaboration, ergodicity, improper priors, integral priors, International Statistical Review, ISI, Juan Antonio Cano, Markov chains, MCMC, noninformative priors, open access, paper, reference priors on February 27, 2026 by xi'an
shoot the messenger & cook the books
Posted in Books, Statistics with tags Agent Orange, America, Argentina, ASA, autoritarian, Bureau of Labor Statistics, conspiracy theories, Council of the European Union, democracy index, Donald Trump, EU, Europe, Greece, ISI, official statistics, Poland, populism, Statistics Poland, The New York Times, theocracy, US elections 2024, US politics on August 2, 2025 by xi'an
Heads of Official Statistics Bureaux has been subjected to suspicion and sometimes prosecution from their governments in the recent past, the most notable cases being Agentina with Graciela Bevacqua and Greece (with Andreas Georgiou), while the ASA and the ISI expressed deep concern this year about the dismissal of Dominik Rozkrut as President of Statistics Poland. Now this undemocratic tide against the independence of official statistics has reached America, with Agent Orange firing the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he did not like the (un)employment report!! Rather than reflecting on the massive impact on the economy of his own, chaotic, economic decisions and counter-decisions.
“What do we do when the president of the United States behaves [like a 5-year-old]? On Friday, President Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the nation’s workaday scorekeeper of employment, wages and productivity. Why? Because the data didn’t make Mr. Trump look good. The statistics were inconvenient. So the president didn’t just challenge the findings; he fired the statistician. That’s not governing. That’s board flipping (…) One danger certainly is that a future Bureau of Labor Statistics head might feel political pressure to fudge a jobs report. The deeper risk is cynicism, the quiet corrosion of faith in institutions. If we can’t believe the numbers, how do we believe anything?” f, Aug. 3
a most unexpected citaXion!
Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, University life with tags book reviews, Canada, CHANCE, Charles Dickens, cruise, David Bellhouse, French horn, International Statistical Review, ISI, Lac Léman, Lausanne, quotes, self-citations, William Playfair, Winnipeg on February 4, 2025 by xi'an
In a conversation between (Canadian) Christian Genest (whom I first met in 1986, in a dinner cruise of Lac Léman organised by the French Statistical Society for its national meeting in Lausanne) and David Bellhouse that recently appeared in the International Statistical Review of January 2025 figures the following bit that quotes my… review of Bellhouse’s William Playfair!
Christian Genest: More recently, you produced some very original work on William Playfair (Bellhouse, 2023), who is generally regarded as the founder of graphical methods in statistics. What about it?
David Bellhouse: The best I can do here is to quote from Christian Robert’s review of my book in Chance (Robert, 2024).
‘The impressions I kept from reading this detailed account of a perfect unknown (as far as I am concerned) are of a rather unpleasant, unappealing, unsuccessful, fame-seeking, inefficient, short-sighted, self-aggrandizing, bigoted, dishonest character, a ‘rascal’ in Stieglerian terms, running away from his debtors for most of his life, with many jail episodes for bankruptcy, while trying to make a living from all sorts of doomed commercial projects, ill-conceived scams, short-lived blackmailing attempts, and mediocre books that did not sell to many’.
I am glad David enjoyed the quote (to which I may have invested more effort than usual to give it a sort of Dickensian flavour). Incidentally, I learned there that David was a French horn player (which would have been my first choice of musical instrument had I been given a choice when starting playing music!)
IISA 2024 [snapshots]
Posted in Books, pictures, Travel, University life with tags Cochin University of Science and Technology, conference, CUST, IISA 2024, India, International Indian Statistical Association, ISI, Kerala, Kochi, Springer-Verlag, tee-shirt, University of Warwick, Use R on January 27, 2025 by xi'an
Two pictures from IISA 2024, with the local organising committee (kudos to them!) and Shreya, Rito and I (with a past-its-prime Use R! Springer tee shirt) attending an MCMC lecture on the Sunday afternoon.
IISA 2024
Posted in Statistics, Travel, University life with tags Bayes factor, Bayesian bootstrap, Bayesian computational methods, Bayesian GANs, Bayesian lasso, Bayesian nonparametrics, betel nut, BNP, Cochin University of Science and Technology, difference in differences model, EM algorithm, IISA 2024, India, insufficient statistic, ISI, Kerala, Kochi, privacy, random walk, Wasserstein distance on January 12, 2025 by xi'an
The IISA 2024 conference was held at the Cochin University of Science and Technology (CUSAT), where talks and posters took place. Among the sessions I attended, I attended a talk on colliding random walks that made three or more impossible in the limit, missed the only privacy talk that I could have attended by Vinayak Rao for indulging into a dawnish swimming session in the very decent hotel pool. In the first session I organised, loosely connected with BNP, Antonietta Mira presented a recent work on predicting EU carbon compensation rates, using a information imbalance rank substitute to correlation that could prove quite interesting in privacy settings, albeit no invariant to reparameterisations (with potential connections with Wasserstein distances), Sonia Petrone gave an overview on her substantial amount of work on empirical Bayes in Bayes (EBIB), making me wonder at natural ABC or EM ways to bypass the computation of the empirical Bayes hyperparameter computation (but also on measuring the overfitting degree of EBIB-ing), maybe exploiting the representation of the marginal as an average of predictive, and Debdeep Pati argued towards an interpretable and robust ML, using for estimation divergence a mixture of two KL’s that is remindful of GANs (as well as of Lasso and exponentially tilted empirical likelihood à la Chib & al.), implemented by a form of Bbootstrap. Plus enjoying a locally flavoured acronym, namely BETEL.
The second session I organised was centred on Bayesian computations, with both Sid Chib and Ritabrata Dutta (U Warwick) presenting a Bayesian modelling of difference-in-difference models in clinical trials and several works on (score based) generalized Bayes models with Shreya Roy (U Warwick), who further won a poster prize at IISA 2024. I terminated the session with a talk on our insufficient Gibbs sampler, which connected with some aspects of both Sid’s and Rito’s talks.
As in earlier editions of IISA I attended, the local organisation was most enjoyable, from supportive staff and students, relaxed atmosphere, easy commutes, heaps of great food, and unlimited chai! Plus meeting and listening to participants I had met in these earlier editions. Looking forward the 2026 edition!
