In the recent days, we have had a lively discussion among AEs of the Annals of Statistics, as to whether or not set up a policy regarding publications of documents that have already been published in a shortened (8 pages) version in a machine learning conference like NIPS. Or AISTATS. While I obviously cannot disclose details here, the debate is quite interesting and may bring the machine learning and statistics communities closer if resolved in a certain way. My own and personal opinion on that matter is that what matters most is what’s best for Annals of Statistics rather than the authors’ tenure or the different standards in the machine learning community. If the submitted paper is based on a brilliant and novel idea that can appeal to a sufficiently wide part of the readership and if the maths support of that idea is strong enough, we should publish the paper. Whether or not an eight-page preliminary version has been previously published in a conference proceeding like NIPS does not seem particularly relevant to me, as I find those short papers mostly unreadable and hence do not read them. Since Annals of Statistics runs an anti-plagiarism software that is most likely efficient, blatant cases of duplications could be avoided. Of course, this does not solve all issues and papers with similar contents can and will end up being published. However, this is also the case for statistics journals and statistics, in the sense that brilliant ideas sometimes end up being split between two or three major journals.
Archive for proceedings
what to do with refereed conference proceedings?
Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags AISTATS 2016, Annals of Statistics, machine learning, NIPS 2015, proceedings, publication, refereeing on August 8, 2016 by xi'anAISTATS 2016 [programme]
Posted in Books, Kids, pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags AISTATS 2016, Andalucía, Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, Cadiz, conferences, machine learning, poster session, proceedings, Spain on March 14, 2016 by xi'an
The full programme for AISTATS 2016 in Cádiz is now on-line, including the posters (except for the additional posters by MLSS participants). Richard Samworth is scheduled to talk on Monday morning, May 9, Kamalika Chaudhuri on Tuesday morning, May 10, and Adam Tauman Kalai on Wednesday morning, May 11. As at the previous AISTATS meeting, poster sessions are central to the day, while evenings are free (which shows this is not a Bayesian meeting!!!). See you in Cádiz, hopefully! (Registration is still open, just in case.)
AISTATS 2016 [post-decisions]
Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags AISTATS 2016, Andalucía, Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, Cadiz, conferences, editor, machine learning, proceedings, refereeing, rejection, scientific journals, Spain on December 27, 2015 by xi'anNow that the (extended) deadline for AISTATS 2016 decisions is gone, I can gladly report that out of 594 submissions, we accepted 165 papers, including 35 oral presentations. As reported in the previous blog post, I remain amazed at the gruesome efficiency of the processing machinery and at the overwhelmingly intense involvement of the various actors who handled those submissions. And at the help brought by the Toronto Paper Matching System, developed by Laurent Charlin and Richard Zemel. I clearly was not as active and responsive as many of those actors and definitely not [and by far] as my co-program-chair, Arthur Gretton, who deserves all the praise for achieving a final decision by the end of the year. We have already received a few complaints from rejected authors, but this is to be expected with a rejection rate of 73%. (More annoying were the emails asking for our decisions in the very final days…) An amazing and humbling experience for me, truly! See you in Cadiz, hopefully.
AISTATS 2016 [post-submissions]
Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags AISTATS 2014, AISTATS 2016, Andalucía, Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, Cadiz, conferences, editor, machine learning, proceedings, refereeing, scientific journals, Spain on October 22, 2015 by xi'anNow that the deadline for AISTATS 2016 submissions is past, I can gladly report that we got the amazing number of 559 submissions, which is much more than what was submitted to the previous AISTATS conferences. To the point it made us fear for a little while [but not any longer!] that the conference room was not large enough. And hope that we had to install video connections in the hotel bar!
Which also means handling about the same amount of papers as a year of JRSS B submissions within a single month!, the way those submissions are handled for the AISTATS 2016 conference proceedings. The process is indeed [as in other machine learning conferences] to allocate papers to associate editors [or meta-reviewers or area chairs] with a bunch of papers and then have those AEs allocate papers to reviewers, all this within a few days, as the reviews have to be returned to authors within a month, for November 16 to be precise. This sounds like a daunting task but it proceeded rather smoothly due to a high degree of automation (this is machine-learning, after all!) in processing those papers, thanks to (a) the immediate response to the large majority of AEs and reviewers involved, who bid on the papers that were of most interest to them, and (b) a computer program called the Toronto Paper Matching System, developed by Laurent Charlin and Richard Zemel. Which tremendously helps with managing about everything! Even when accounting for the more formatted entries in such proceedings (with an 8 page limit) and the call to the conference participants for reviewing other papers, I remain amazed at the resulting difference in the time scales for handling papers in the fields of statistics and machine-learning. (There was a short lived attempt to replicate this type of processing for the Annals of Statistics, if I remember well.)
Bayesian statistics from methods to models and applications
Posted in Books, Kids, pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life, Wines with tags Austria, BAYSM 2014, conference, proceedings, Springer-Verlag, Vienna, Wien, WU Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien, young Bayesians on July 5, 2015 by xi'an
A Springer book published in conjunction with the great BAYSM 2014 conference in Wien last year has now appeared. Here is the table of contents:
- Bayesian Survival Model Based on Moment Characterization by Arbel, Julyan et al.
- A New Finite Approximation for the NGG Mixture Model: An Application to Density Estimation by Bianchini, Ilaria
- Distributed Estimation of Mixture Model by Dedecius, Kamil et al.
- Jeffreys’ Priors for Mixture Estimation by Grazian, Clara and X
- A Subordinated Stochastic Process Model by Palacios, Ana Paula et al.
- Bayesian Variable Selection for Generalized Linear Models Using the Power-Conditional-Expected-Posterior Prior by Perrakis, Konstantinos et al.
- Application of Interweaving in DLMs to an Exchange and Specialization Experiment by Simpson, Matthew
- On Bayesian Based Adaptive Confidence Sets for Linear Functionals by Szabó, Botond
- Identifying the Infectious Period Distribution for Stochastic Epidemic Models Using the Posterior Predictive Check by Alharthi, Muteb et al.
- A New Strategy for Testing Cosmology with Simulations by Killedar, Madhura et al.
- Formal and Heuristic Model Averaging Methods for Predicting the US Unemployment Rate by Kolly, Jeremy
- Bayesian Estimation of the Aortic Stiffness based on Non-invasive Computed Tomography Images by Lanzarone, Ettore et al.
- Bayesian Filtering for Thermal Conductivity Estimation Given Temperature Observations by Martín-Fernández, Laura et al.
- A Mixture Model for Filtering Firms’ Profit Rates by Scharfenaker, Ellis et al.
Enjoy!
