Archive for SIOD 2013
snapshot from my SIOD 2013 talk
Posted in pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags ABC, conference, Ho Chi Min City, SIOD 2013, slides, Vietnam on July 11, 2013 by xi'an
Statistics, with interactions
Posted in pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags Monte Carlo Statistical Methods, regeneration, Saigon, simulation, SIOD 2013, testing of hypotheses, Ton Duc Thang University, Vietnam on June 6, 2013 by xi'an
Due to a tight June schedule (3rd conference in a week!), I only stayed one day at the SIOD 2013 conference in Saigon. (SIOD means Statistics and interaction with other disciplines.) The conference was housed by Ton Duc Thang University, on a very modern campus, and it sounded like the university had drafted a lot of his undergrads to catter to the SIOD participants: similar to the Bayesian conference in India a few months ago, those students would stand at the ready to guide us around the campus and to relay any problem to the organisers. This was very helpful and enjoyable, a plus being that most female students wore the traditional pink costume adopted by the university, but it also made me a wee bit uncomfortable as I do not know how much say those students had in this draft… In particular, most of the students I talked with were from other fields than Statistics. (And definitely not complaining, but being on the opposite very friendly the whole time!) A funny side story is that I got a wake-up call from the conference organisers in the morning as I had missed a welcome ceremony with the president due to oversleeping (itself due to an excess of iced coffee rather than minimal jetlag!). Among the few talks I attended, some French school statistics due to the presence of a large contingent from Toulouse, a talk about zero inflated normal distributions which sounded like missing-at-random normal observations (hence easy to process), and a talk about the point of using Bayes factors in hypothesis testing which essentially if independently provided a second version of my course from the previous day.
Yesterday, I also had a short discussion with Paul Minh who presented a talk on a general regenerative device for MCMC algorithms, using a bound on the target density rather than on the Markov transition in order to achieve easier regeneration. While a neat idea, this method requires the construction of a lower bound that can easily simulated. Furthermore, if the regeneration probability is low, the mixing speed may remain similar to the original MCMC sampler, as the method ressorts to a standard MCMC step on the remaining part of the target density.
