Archive for unconference
ELLIS UnCønference
Posted in Travel, University life with tags Copenhagen, Denmark, ELLIS, EU, EurIPS 2025, NeurIPS 2025, posters, unconference, workshops on August 4, 2025 by xi'an
EUrIPS!
Posted in pictures, Travel, University life with tags Affinity workshop, Copenhagen, Denmark, ELLIS, EU, EurIPS 2025, Europe, European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems, mirror workshop, NeurIPS 2025, unconference on July 28, 2025 by xi'an
differentially private distributed Bayesian linear regression with MCMC
Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, University life with tags Bayesian inference, differential privacy, elephant, ELLIS network, HEC, ICML 2023, Jouy-en-Josas, MCMC, randomisation, unconference on August 30, 2023 by xi'an
An ICML 2023 paper by Barıs¸ Alparslan, Sinan Yıldırım¸ and Ilker Birbil that (re)addresses the issue of privacy when running a Bayesian regression analysis. Resorting to the common notion of differential privacy, imposing a limited variability if a single observation is modified, and a Gaussian randomisation of the observations.
“A differentially private algorithm constrains the difference between the probability distributions of the output values obtained from neighbouring data sets”
In the super classical setup of simple Normal linear regression, y=Xθ+σε. Summary statistics are chosen as
S=X’X and z=X’y,
(why the separation?) then randomised. (Keeping Ŝ definite positive? Not necessarily, it appear.) Inspired directly from Dwork & al. (2014). The authors still manage to spend an entire column in (re)deriving the conditional Normal distribution of z conditional on S and (θ,σ)… Which is later exploited for integrating z out in the MCMC algorithm.
“some important differences between our work and that of Bernstein & Sheldon (2019) [stem] from the choice of summary statistics and the consequent hierarchical structure used for modelling linear regression [and]lead to significant differences in the inference methods as well as significant computational advantages [O(d³) vs. O(d⁶)]”
In a distributed setting several agents are handling their own data and keep their privacy by the same mechanishttps://www.slideshare.net/xianblog/discussion-of-icml23pdfm [as in the top graph from the paper]. On principle, a Bayesian analysis of the resulting hierarchical model should directly consider the posterior on the global parameter by considering the distributions of the randomised pairs (ẑ,Ŝ). The elephant in the room is the distribution of the regressors, which is customarily unknown and not accounted for in a traditional Bayesian analysis. It is needed here due to the division in S and z, plus the randomisation step that calls for the posterior distribution of S given Ŝ. Elephant that is exfiltrated by either assuming Normality or substituting Ŝ for S without accounting for the noise! Definitely not exactly Bayesian. Another column is spent on the Metropolis-within-Gibbs simulation of the posterior…
Overall, I remain reserved about this approach, since it does not follow a clear Bayesian pathway and in particular does not incorporate privacy as part of the Bayesian decision analysis.
ellis unconference [not in Hawai’i]
Posted in pictures, Running, Travel, University life with tags Bièvre, business school, Chateaubriand, CIRM, diffusions, ELLIS network, Europe, Flatiron Institute, France, Hawaii, HEC, Hi! Paris, ICML 2023, International Conference on Machine Learning, ISBA 2021, Jouy-en-Josas, Maurice Kenneth Tweedie, mirror workshop, normalising flow, Paris, Paris Artificial Intelligence for Society, Paris Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, SMC, the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems, Tweedie's formula, unconference, variational Bayes methods, Verrières, warping, Wasserstein distance on July 26, 2023 by xi'an
As ICML 2023 is happening this week, in Hawai’i, many did not have the opportunity to get there, for whatever reason, and hence the ellis (European Lab for Learning {and} Intelligent Systems] board launched [fairly late!] with the help of Hi! Paris an unconference (i.e., a mirror) that is taking place in HEC, Jouy-en-Josas, SW of Paris, for AI researchers presenting works (theirs or others’) presented at ICML 2023. Or not. There was no direct broadcasting of talks as we had (had) in CIRM for ISBA 2020 2021. But some presentations based on preregistered talks. Over 50 people showed up in Jouy.
As it happened, I had quite an exciting bike ride to the HEC campus from home, under a steady rain, crossing a (modest) forest (de Verrières) I had never visited before, despite it being a few km from home, getting a wee bit lost, stopped by a train Xing between Bièvre and Jouy, and ending up at the campus just in time for the first talk (as I had not accounted for the huge altitude differential). Among curiosities met on the way, “giant” sequoias, a Tonkin pond, Chateaubriand’s house.
As always I am rather impressed by the efficiency of AI-ML conferences run, with papers+slides+reviews online, plus extra material as in this example. Lots of papers on diffusion models this year, apparently. (In conjunction with the trend observed at the Flatiron workshop last Fall.) Below are incoherent tidbits from the presentations I attended:
- exponential convergence of the Sinkhorn algorithm by Alain Durmus and co-authors, with the surprise occurrence of a left Haar measure
- a paper (by Jerome Baum, Heishiro Kanagawa, and my friend Arthur Gretton) on Stein discrepancy, with an Zanella Stein operator relating to Metropolis-Hastings/Barker since it has expectation zero under stationarity, interesting approach to variable length random variables, not a RJMCMC, but nearby.
- the occurance of a criticism of the EU GDPR that did not feel appropriate for synthetic data used in privacy protection.
- the alternative Sliced Wasserstein distance, making me wonder if we could optimally go from measure μ to measure ζ using random directions or how much was lost this way.
- Information Maximizing Optimal Transport with dubious substitute for conditional expectation:
![\mathbb E[y|X=x] = \mathbb E\left[y\frac{f_{XY}(x,y)}{f_X(x)f_Y(y)}|X=x\right] = \frac{\mathbb E\left[y\frac{f_{XY}(x,y)}{f_Y(y)}|X=x\right]}{f_X(x)}](https://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=%5Cmathbb+E%5By%7CX%3Dx%5D+%3D+%5Cmathbb+E%5Cleft%5By%5Cfrac%7Bf_%7BXY%7D%28x%2Cy%29%7D%7Bf_X%28x%29f_Y%28y%29%7D%7CX%3Dx%5Cright%5D+%3D+%5Cfrac%7B%5Cmathbb+E%5Cleft%5By%5Cfrac%7Bf_%7BXY%7D%28x%2Cy%29%7D%7Bf_Y%28y%29%7D%7CX%3Dx%5Cright%5D%7D%7Bf_X%28x%29%7D&bg=000000&fg=B0B0B0&s=0&c=20201002)
as (a) densities are replaced with kernel estimates, (b) the outer density may be very small, (c) no variance assessment is provided.
- Markov score climbing and transport score climbing using a normalising flow, for variational approximation, presented by Christian Naesseth, with a warping transform that sounded like inverting the flow (?)
- Yazid Janati not presenting their ICML paper State and parameter learning with PARIS particle Gibbs written with Gabriel Cardoso, Sylvain Le Corff, Eric Moulines and Jimmy Olsson, but another work with a diffusion based model to be learned by SMC and a clever call to Tweedie’s formula. (Maurice Kenneth Tweedie, not Richard Tweedie!) Which I just realised I have used many times when working on Bayesian shrinkage estimators
