Archive for València
Valencia snapshot [#2]
Posted in Kids, pictures, Running, Travel with tags Spain, statue, sunrise, trail running, València on June 5, 2015 by xi'an
O’Bayes 2015 [day #3]
Posted in Statistics, Travel, University life, Wines with tags Bayes factors, O'Bayes 2015, Power-Expected-Posterior Priors, prior assessment, reference priors, Spanish wines, València, variable selection, Virgulilla on June 5, 2015 by xi'an
The third day of the meeting was a good illustration of the diversity of the themes [says a member of the scientific committee!], from “traditional” O’Bayes talks on reference priors by the father of all reference priors (!), José Bernardo, re-examinations of expected posterior priors, on properties of Bayes factors, or on new versions of the Lindley-Jeffreys paradox, to the radically different approach of Simpson et al. presented by Håvard Rue. I was obviously most interested in posterior expected priors!, with the new notion brought in by Dimitris Fouskakis, Ioannis Ntzoufras and David Draper of a lower impact of the minimal sample on the resulting prior by the trick of a lower (than one) power of the likelihood. Since this change seemed to go beyond the “minimal” in minimal sample size, I am somehow puzzled that this can be achieved, but the normal example shows this is indeed possible. The next difficulty is then in calibrating this power as I do not see any intuitive justification in a specific power. The central talk of the day was in my opinion Håvard’s as it challenged most tenets of the Objective Bayes approach, presented in a most eager tone, even though it did not generate particularly heated comments from the audience. I have already discussed here an earlier version of this paper and I keep on thinking this proposal for PC priors is a major breakthrough in the way we envision priors and their derivation. I was thus sorry to hear the paper had not been selected as a Read Paper by the Royal Statistical Society, as it would have nicely suited an open discussion, but I hope it will find another outlet that allows for a discussion! As an aside, Håvard discussed the case of a Student’s t degree of freedom as particularly challenging for prior construction, albeit I would have analysed the problem using instead a model choice perspective (on an usually continuous space of models).
As this conference day had a free evening, I took the tram with friends to the town beach and we had a fantastic [if hurried] dinner in a small bodega [away from the uninspiring beach front] called Casa Montaña, a place decorated with huge barrels, offering amazing tapas and wines, a perfect finale to my Spanish trip. Too bad we had to vacate the dinner room for the next batch of customers…
Valencia snapshot
Posted in pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life, Wines with tags clouds, roofs, Spain, sunset, València on June 4, 2015 by xi'an
O’Bayes 2015 [day #2]
Posted in pictures, Running, Statistics, Travel, University life, Wines with tags ABC, computer experiment model, embedded models, false discovery rate, Susie Bayarri, València, Verema on June 4, 2015 by xi'an
This morning was the most special time of the conference in that we celebrated Susie Bayarri‘s contributions and life together with members of her family. Jim gave a great introduction that went over Susie’s numerous papers and the impact they had in Statistics and outside Statistics. As well as her recognised (and unsurprising if you knew her) expertise in wine and food! The three talks in that morning were covering some of the domains within Susie’s fundamental contributions and delivered by former students of her: model assessment through various types of predictive p-values by Maria Eugenia Castellanos, Bayesian model selection by Anabel Forte, and computer models by Rui Paulo, all talks that translated quite accurately the extent of Susie’s contributions… In a very nice initiative, the organisers had also set a wine tasting break (at 10am!) around two vintages that Susie had reviewed in the past years [with reviews to show up soon in the Wines section of the ‘Og!]
The talks of the afternoon session were by Jean-Bernard (JB) Salomond about a new proposal to handle embedded hypotheses in a non-parametric framework and by James Scott about false discovery rates for neuroimaging. Despite the severe theoretical framework behind the proposal, JB managed a superb presentation that mostly focussed on the intuition for using the smoothed (or approximative) version of the null hypothesis. (A flavour of ABC, somehow?!) Also kudos to JB for perpetuating my tradition of starting sections with unrelated pictures. James’ topic was more practical Bayes or pragmatic Bayes than objective Bayes in that he analysed a large fMRI experiment on spatial working memory, introducing a spatial pattern that led to a complex penalised Lasso-like optimisation. The data was actually an fMRI of the brain of Russell Poldrack, one of James’ coauthors on that paper.
The (sole) poster session was on the evening with a diverse range of exciting topics—including three where I was a co-author, by Clara Grazian, Kaniav Kamary, and Kerrie Mengersen—but it was alas too short or I was alas too slow to complete the tour before it ended! In retrospect we could have broken it into two sessions since Wednesday evening is a free evening.
jogging for Susie
Posted in Running, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags Bayesian statisticians, jogging, Spain, Susie Bayarri, València on June 2, 2015 by xi'an
A few of us met (somewhat) early this morning to run together in memory of Susie, wearing the bright red tee-shirts given to us by the O’Bayes 2015 conference organisers. And going along the riverbed that circles the old town of Valencià. Till next run, Susie!
