A paper by Borders et al. in the 19 September issue of Nature offers an interesting mix of computing and electronics and optimisation. With two preparatory tribunes! One [rather overdone] on Feynman’s quest. As a possible alternative to quantum computers for creating probabilistic bits. And making machine learning (as an optimisation program) more efficient. And another one explaining more clearly what is in the paper. As well as the practical advantage of the approach over quantum computing. As for the paper itself, the part I understood about factorising an integer F via minimising the squared difference between a product of two integers and F and using simulated annealing sounded rather easy, while the part I did not about constructing a semi-conductor implementing this stochastic search sounded too technical (especially in the métro during rush hour). Even after checking the on-line supplementary material. Interestingly, the paper claims for higher efficiency thanks to asynchronicity than a regular Gibbs simulation of Boltzman machines, quoting Roberts and Sahu (1997) without further explanation and possibly out of context (as the latter is not concerned with optimisation).
Archive for Series B
stochastic magnetic bits, simulated annealing and Gibbs sampling
Posted in Statistics with tags factorisation, Gibbs sampling, Nature, optimisation, p-bits, prime numbers, quantum comuting, quantum cryptograpy, Series B, simulated annealing on October 17, 2019 by xi'anthe paper where you are a node
Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags Annals of Statistics, Bayesian inference, Biometrika, car crash, causality, citation map, Cross Validation, gamebook, JASA, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, JRSSB, resampling, Series B, social networks, Valencia conferences, Where is Wally? on February 5, 2019 by xi'an
Sophie Donnet pointed out to me this arXived paper by Tianxi Li, Elizaveta Levina, and Ji Zhu, on a network resampling strategy for X validation, where I appear as a datapoint rather than as a [direct] citation! Which reminded me of the “where you are the hero” gamebooks with which my kids briefly played, before computer games took over. The model selection method is illustrated on a dataset made of X citations [reduced to 706 authors] in all papers published between 2003 and 2012 in the Annals of Statistics, Biometrika, JASA, and JRSS Series B. With the outcome being the determination of a number of communities, 20, which the authors labelled as they wanted, based on 10 authors with the largest number of citations in the category. As it happens, I appear in the list, within the “mixed (causality + theory + Bayesian)” category (!), along with Jamie Robbins, Paul Fearnhead, Gilles Blanchard, Zhiqiang Tan, Stijn Vansteelandt, Nancy Reid, Jae Kwang Kim, Tyler VanderWeele, and Scott Sisson, which is somewhat mind-boggling in that I am pretty sure I never quoted six of these authors [although I find it hilarious that Jamie appears in the category, given that we almost got into a car crash together, at one of the Valencià meetings!].
a good start in Series B!
Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, University life with tags ABC, approximate Bayesian inference, generative model, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Olympic National Park, peer review, Series B, sunrise, Wasserstein distance on January 5, 2019 by xi'an
Just received the great news for the turn of the year that our paper on ABC using Wasserstein distance was accepted in Series B! Inference in generative models using the Wasserstein distance, written by Espen Bernton, Pierre Jacob, Mathieu Gerber, and myself, bypasses the (nasty) selection of summary statistics in ABC by considering the Wasserstein distance between observed and simulated samples. It focuses in particular on non-iid cases like time series in what I find fairly innovative ways. I am thus very glad the paper is going to appear in JRSS B, as it has methodological consequences that should appeal to the community at large.
Biometrika
Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags academic journals, Anthony Davison, Biometrika, Paul Fearnhead, PCI Comput Stat, Peer Community, scientific editing, Series B on November 29, 2017 by xi'an
After ten years of outstanding dedication to Biometrika, Anthony Davison is retiring as Editor of Biometrika on 31 December. Ten years! Running a top journal like Biometrika is a massive service to the statistics community, especially when considering the painstaking stage of literally editing each paper towards the stylistic requirements of the journal. For which we definitely should all be quite grateful to Anthony. And to the new Editor, Paul Fearnhead, for taking over. I will actually join the editorial board as assistant editor, along with Omiros Papaspiliopoulos, meaning we will share together the task of screening and allocating submissions. A bit daunting given the volume of submissions is roughly similar to the one I was handling for Series B ten years ago. And given the PCI Comput Stat experiment starting soon!
the end of the Series B’log…
Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags blogging, discussion paper, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B, Series B'log on September 22, 2017 by xi'an
Today is the last and final day of Series B’log as David Dunson, Piotr Fryzlewicz and myself have decided to stop the experiment, faute de combattants. (As we say in French.) The authors nicely contributed long abstracts of their papers, for which I am grateful, but with a single exception, no one came out with comments or criticisms, and the idea to turn some Series B papers into discussion papers does not seem to appeal, at least in this format. Maybe the concept will be rekindled in another form in the near future, but for now we let it lay down. So be it!
