I just learned that Paul Deheuvels died last week. He was head of the statistics department at Université Pierre & Marie Curie when I was a lecturer there (1987-1992). And a professor of statistics and probability there for his entire career, from 1974 to 2013. While we were working on completely different topics, and had divergent political views, we kept an amicable connection throughout the years, as we were living close enough to meet once in a while at the local farmers’ market and have a quick chat. When I was considering my options for pursuing a PhD, while writing a Master thesis on commutative Lie algebras with his father, René Deheuvels, he was one of the people who offered to supervise me (on a topic related with empirical processes, which were his forte). Later, he suggested I wrote a very short introduction to Bayesian statistics in the Que sais-je? collection (where he published three books) and, when my manuscript was found too theoretical, he proposed to publish an expanded version in the Economica collection, which ended up being the French version of The Bayesian Choice. I also remember a very kind email he sent me while I was recovering from my climbing accident, in 2013, as a fellow climber. (For a long while, he would drive to Fontainebleau once or twice a week for bouldering.) As alluded (to) above, Deheuvels’ political views were very conservative, with a proximity to the far-right Club de l’Horloge and a mix of vieille France traditionalism and libertarianism positions. For sure, he never was shy from embarking in controversies, from defending Allègre’s climato-scepticism to backing Séralini’s controversial study on the cancerogenic effects of Mosanto’s transgenic maize.
Archive for Université Pierre et Marie Curie
Paul Deheuvels (1948-2026)
Posted in Books, Mountains, University life with tags Bayesian Choice, Bayesian statistics, Book, bouldering, Bourg-la-Reine, climatosceptic, climbing accident, Club de l'Horloge, Economica, empirical process, Fontainebleau, functional estimation, Jussieu, Monsanto, obituary, Paris, Paris 6, Paul Deheuvels, Que sais-je?, The Bayesian Choice, thumb, transgenic corn, UMPC, Université Pierre et Marie Curie on February 5, 2026 by xi'anN[eur]IP[ari]S [23-24 November]
Posted in pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags France, Jussieu, Lutèce, mirror workshop, NeurIPS 2022, NeurIPS@Paris 2022, New Orleans, Paris, Place Jussieu, Sorbonne Université, Université Pierre et Marie Curie on October 10, 2022 by xi'an
The Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (abbreviated as NeurIPS) will see a mirror version in Paris this Fall, albeit in advance of the main meeting (which starts the week after on 29 November and in New Orleans, hence with a France connection!). The concept is original in that (interested) authors of accepted 2022 NeurIPS papers will present their paper on 23-24 November. Registration is free. But attendance is not guaranteed if the number of registrations exceed the site capacity, in which case attendees will be selected at random.
BASICS workshop in Paris [29-30/09]
Posted in pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags ANR, Bayesian non-parametrics, Paris, satellite workshop, Sorbonne Université, uncertainty quantification, Université Pierre et Marie Curie on September 19, 2022 by xi'an
There will be a workshop on Bayesian non-parametrics, deep learning and uncertainty quantification, marking the closure of the BASICS ANR project, at Paris Sorbonne University, on campus Pierre et Marie Curie, on 29-30 September, with many friends speaking there. The participation is free. Registration is, however, compulsory and now open.
Jean-Paul Benzécri (1932-2019)
Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, University life with tags analyse des correspondances, analyse des données, French statistics, ISUP, Jean-Paul Benzécri, Jussieu, obituary, Paris 6, SAS, Université de Paris, Université Pierre et Marie Curie on December 3, 2019 by xi'an
I learned last weekend that Jean-Paul Benzécri had died earlier in the week. He was a leading and charismatic figure of the French renewal in data analysis (or analyse des données) that used mostly algebraic tools to analyse large datasets, while staying as far as possible from the strong abstraction of French statistics at that time. While I did not know him on a personal basis, I remember from my lecturer years there that he used to come to Institut de Statistique de l’Université de Paris (ISUP), Université Pierre et Marie Curie, once a week and meet with a large group of younger statisticians, students and junior faculty, and then talk to them for long hours while walking back and forth along the corridor in Jussieu. Showing extreme dedication from the group as this windowless corridor was particularly ghastly! (I also remember less fondly hours spent over piles and piles of SAS printout trying to make sense of multiple graphs of projections produced by these algebraic methods and feeling there were too many degrees of freedom for them to feel rigorous enough.)
Christian Robert is giving a talk in Jussieu tomorrow
Posted in Statistics, University life with tags Archimedean copulas, composite likelihood, copulas, CREST, Jussieu, Paris, seminar, Université Pierre et Marie Curie on September 26, 2019 by xi'an
My namesake Christian (Yann) Robert (CREST) is giving a seminar tomorrow in Jussieu (Université Pierre & Marie Curie, couloir 16-26, salle 209), between 2 and 3, on composite likelihood estimation method for hierarchical Archimedean copulas defined with multivariate compound distributions. Here is the abstract:
We consider the family of hierarchical Archimedean copulas obtained from multivariate exponential mixture distributions through compounding, as introduced by Cossette et al. (2017). We investigate ways of determining the structure of these copulas and estimating their parameters. An agglomerative clustering technique based on the matrix of Spearman’s rhos, combined with a bootstrap procedure, is used to identify the tree structure. Parameters are estimated through a top-down composite likelihood. The validity of the approach is illustrated through two simulation studies in which the procedure is explained step by step. The composite likelihood method is also compared to the full likelihood method in a simple case where the latter is computable.
