Archive for lecture

Bayesian Adversarial Privacy [v2]

Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 11, 2026 by xi'an

We have just reposted our paper Bayesian Adversarial Privacy on arXiv to reflect the revision we wrote in the past months, to address the (quite sensible) comments from the reviewers. Interestingly the discussants of my Akaike lecture made similar points. The main changes are in explaining more clearly the nature of the combined loss, with Antoine coming up with the use of illuminating R-U map representations, in enlarging the references to other approaches, in stressing that Eve was an Alice’s construct rather than a genuine adversary, but still integrating the case of “multiple Eves”, in mellowing our criticisms of DP, and in expanding the conclusion with limitations and extensions subsections.

Bayesian Privacy [Akaike Lecture slides]

Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 10, 2026 by xi'an

Insufficient Gibbs sampling [at COMPSTAT 2024]

Posted in pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 29, 2024 by xi'an


The COMPSTAT 2024 programme proved somewhat remote from my interests, far from the 1998 version I attended that was buzzing and brimming with MCMC sessions! (Correlatively, apart from the speakers in my own session, I hardly knew anyone there.) I however [missed a Bayesian session as I] attended a session on change-point detection, with a talk by Ziyang Yang (Lancaster University) on an acceleration proposal when the data size is too much, by aggregating similar datapoints, for which I would like to see a theoretical analysis of the impact of this aggregation on the quality (and consistency) of the attached Bayes factor. In my own session, I did not feel overly comfortable with the presentation of a commercial [i.e., for sale] software for pharmacokinetics.

I also enjoyed spending the day in Gießen, from running to the top of nearby Burg Glieberg at sunrise to swimming outdoor in the local 50m Freibad.

Statistical Demography by Adrian Raftery [lectures]

Posted in Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , on September 27, 2021 by xi'an

[de]quarantined by slideshare

Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 11, 2021 by xi'an

A follow-up episode to the SlideShare m’a tuer [sic] saga: After the 20 November closure of my xianblog account and my request for an explanation, I was told by Linkedin that a complaint has been made about one of my talks for violation of copyright. Most surprisingly, at least at first, it was about the slides for the graduate lectures I gave ten years ago at CREST on (re)reading Jaynes’ Probability Theory. While the slides contain a lot of short quotes from the Logic of Science, somewhat necessarily since I discuss the said book, there are also many quotes from Jeffreys’ Theory of Probability and “t’is but a scratch” on the contents of this lengthy book… Plus, the pdf file appears to be accessible on several sites, including one with an INRIA domain. Since I had to fill a “Counter-Notice of Copyright Infringement” to unlock the rest of the depository, I just hope no legal action is going to be taken about this lecture. But I remain puzzled at the reasoning behind the complaint, unwilling to blame radical Jaynesians for it! As an aside, here are the registered 736 views of the slides for the past year: