The ICSDS 2024 meeting in Nice is quite impressive and not primarily because it is in Nice under a beautiful December sun. As other (numerous) IMS meetings I attended (since the initial one in Uppsala in 1990!), the program is of high quality and along topics that are currently moving fast or emerging. From the sessions I attended, e-values are strongly represented, although it remains unclear to me why they should constitute a major departure from p-values, as they stick to hypothesis testing, Type I error, power, and the whole paraphernalia of Neyman-Pearson formalism. If I manage to attend a BIRS workshop on the subject next Summer, I may manage to get a better e-derstanding!
The MCMC (only!) session included a presentation by Guanyang Wang that generalised different approximate MCMC schemes into a unified one. And one by Filippo Ascolani on Gibbs beating the competition! I also attended the Bayesian prediction session, where my friends Sonia Petrone and Chris Holmes have presentations on their respective Series B papers. I discussed both on the ‘Og, on 15 March 2023 and 07 November 2022, respectively. This time, I found that both talks had a Bayesian bootstrap flavour, which is not surprising when considering the non-parametric nature of the approach. And they left me wondering at it being protected from overfitting.
My only plenary session was Cynthia Dwork’s on outcome indistinguishability, which, while related to the privacy topics I was topic, remained somewhat obscure as to its purpose. Meaning I have to get through the paper to get a more holistic perspective.
Of course, Nice in Winter is a very nice place, with the waterfront available for running an uninterrupted 15km as we found out with Jérémie Houssineau (at a brisk 4’09” pace I had not planned before starting!) and the sea all for myself (for a dozen minutes before losing digits!). Unfortunately I had to skip the final day due to examinations of the Paris Dauphine MASH master. And miss Stan receiving a student award. But I am looking forward the next iterations of ICSDS. (Not including Copenhagen, Madrid and many many other places in 2025, since ICSDS seemed a most common name for conferences, some presumably predatory! The true location is Sevilla, to keep up with the Mediterranean theme of ICSDS!)
Archive for Uppsala
Nice meeting!
Posted in pictures, R, Running, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags Approximate Bayesian computation, Bayesian bootstrap, Bayesian predictive, BIRS, Côte d'Azur, Chennai, Chennai Mathematical Institute, e-values, French Riviera, Gibbs sampling, hypothesis testing, ICSDS 2024, IMS, indistinguishability, Institute of Mathematical Statistics, Neyman-Pearson tests, Nice, open water swimming, p-values, predatory conferences, Promenade des Anglais, reproducible research, Uppsala, w on December 18, 2024 by xi'anA of A
Posted in Books, Kids, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags algorithms, Art Owen, bursaries, computational statistics, Edinburgh, ISBA, Luc Devroye, MCQMC, Monte Carlo Statistical Methods, Philippe Flajolet, Rennes, simulation, summer school, University of Warwick, Uppsala on November 30, 2017 by xi'an
Next June, at the same time as the ISBA meeting in Edinburgh, which is slowly taking shape, there will be an Analysis of Algorithms (AofA) meeting in Uppsala (Sweden) with Luc Devroye as the plenary Flajolet Award speaker. The full name of the conference is the 29th International Conference on Probabilistic, Combinatorial and Asymptotic Methods for the Analysis of Algorithms. While it is unfortunate the two conferences take place at the same time (and not in the same location), this also provides a continuity of conferences with the following week MCqMC in Rennes and the subsequent week summer school in simulation in Warwick (with Art Owen as the LMS Lecturer).
About our summer school, I want to point out that, thanks to several sponsors, we will be able to provide a consequent number of bursaries for junior researchers. This should be an additional incentive for attendees of the previous week Young Bayesian meeting (BAYSM) to remain the extra days nearby Warwick and attend this fantastic opportunity. Other instructors are Nicolas Chopin, Mark Huber and Jeff Rosenthal!
wet summer reads [book reviews]
Posted in Books, Kids, Mountains, pictures, Travel with tags Artin conjecture, book reviews, cat, Edinburgh, Fred Vargas, Ian Rankin, Japanese translation, Kjell Eriksson, number theory, rain, Scandinavia, Scotland, sheep, Skye, stray cat, Sweden, Takashi Hiraide, unions, Uppsala, vacations, Yôko Ogawa on September 24, 2017 by xi'an“‘Oh ye of little faith.’ Rebus picked up his lamb chop and bit into it.” Ian Rankin, Rather be the Devil
Rebus’ latest case, a stray cat, a tree that should not be there, psychological worries in Uppsala, maths formulas, these are the themes of some of my vacation books. I read more than usual 
because of the heavy rains we faced in Northern Italy (rather than Scotland!). Ian Rankin’s latest novel Rather be the Devil reunites most of the characters of past novels, from John Rebus to Siobhan Clarke, Malcolm Fox, Big Ger’ Cafferty, and others. The book is just as fun to read as the previous ones (but only if one has read those I presume!), not particularly innovative in its plot, which recalls some earlier ones, and a wee bit disappointing in the way Big Ger’ seems to get the upper hand against Rebus and the (actual) police. Nonetheless pleasant for the characters themselves, including the City of Edinburgh itself!, and the dialogues. Rebus is not dead yet (spoiler?!) so there should be more volumes to come as Rankin does not seem to manage without his trademark detective. (And the above quote comes in connection with the muttonesque puzzle I mention in my post about Skye.)
The second book is a short story by Takashi Hiraide called The Guest Cat (in French, The cat who came from Heaven, both differing from the Japanese Neko ko kyaku) and which reads more like a prose poem than like a novel. It is about a (Japanese) middle-aged childless couple living in a small rented house that is next to a beautiful and decaying Japanese garden. And starting a relation with the neighbours’ beautiful and mysterious cat. Until the cat dies, somewhat inexplicably, and the couple has to go over its sorrow, compounded by the need to leave the special place where they live. This does not sound much of a story but I appreciated the beautiful way it is written (and translated), as well as related to it because of the stray cat that also visits us on a regular basis! (I do not know how well the book has been translated from Japanese into English.)
The third book is called Debout les Morts (translated as The Three Evangelists) and is one of the first detective stories of Fred Vargas, written in 1995. It is funny with well-conceived characters (although they sometimes verge so much on the caricature as to make the novel neo-picaresque) and a fairly original scenario that has a Russian doll or onion structure, involving many (many) layers. I was definitely expecting anything but the shocking ending! The three main characters (hence the English translation title) in the novel are 35-ish jobless historians whose interests range from hunter-gatherers [shouldn’t then he be a pre-historian?!] to the Great [WWI] War, with a medieval expert in the middle. (The author herself is a medieval historian.) As written above, it is excessive in everything, from the characters to the plot, to the number of murders, but or maybe hence it is quite fun to read.
The fourth book is Kjell Eriksson‘s Jorden ma rämna that I would translate from the French version as The earth may well split (as it is not translated in English at this stage), the second volume of the Ann Lindell series, which takes place in Uppsala, and in the nearby Swede countryside. I quite enjoyed this book as the detective part was is almost irrelevant. To the point of having the killer known from the start. As in many Scandinavian noir novels, especially Swedish ones, the social and psychological aspects are predominant, from the multiple events leading a drug addict to commit a series of crimes, to the endless introspection of both the main character and her solitude-seeking boyfriend, from the failures of the social services to deal with the addict to a global yearning for the old and vanished countryside community spirit, to the replacement of genuine workers’ Unions by bureaucratic structures. Not the most comforting read for a dark and stormy night, but definitely a good and well-written book.
And the last book is yet again a Japanese novel by Yôko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and The Professor, which title in French is closer to the Japanese title, The professor’s favourite equation (博士の愛した数式), is about a invalid maths professor who has an 80 minutes memory span, following a car accident. His PhD thesis was about the Artin conjecture. And about his carer (rather than housekeeper) who looks after him and manages to communicate despite the 80 mn barrier. And about the carer’s son who is nicknamed Root for having a head like a square root symbol (!). The book is enjoyable enough to read, with a few basic explanations of number theory, but the whole construct is very contrived as why would the professor manage to solve mathematical puzzles and keep some memory of older baseball games despite the 80mn window. (I also found the naivety of the carer as represented throughout the book a wee bit on the heavy side.)
Not a bad summer for books, in the end!!!
