Following the exciting and innovative talks, posters and discussions at MCMski IV, the editor of Statistics and Computing, Mark Girolami (who also happens to be the new president of the BayesComp section of ISBA, which is taking over the management of future MCMski meetings), kindly proposed to publish a special ... [Read more...]

At MCMSki IV, I attended (and chaired) a session where Martyn Plummer presented some developments on cut models. As I was not sure I had gotten the idea [although this happened to be one of those few sessions where [Read more...]

Dirk Kroese (from UQ, Brisbane) and Joshua Chen (from ANU, Canberra) just published a book entitled Statistical Modeling and Computation, distributed by Springer-Verlag (I cannot tell which series it is part of from the cover or frontpages…) The book is intended mostly for an undergrad audience (or for graduate students ... [Read more...]

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Now that the conference and the Bayesian non-parametric satellite workshop (thanks to Judith!) are over, with (almost) everyone back home, and that the post-partum conference blues settles in (!), I can reflect on how things ran for those meetings and what I could have done to improve them… (Not yet considering ... [Read more...]

Already on the final day..! And still this frustration in being unable to attend three sessions at once… Andrew Gelman started the day with a non-computational talk that broached on themes that are familiar to readers of his blog, on the misuse of significance tests and on recommendations for better ... [Read more...]

The afternoon sessions I attended were “Computational and Methodological Challenges in evidence synthesis and multi-step” organised by Nicky Best and Sylvia Richardson and “Approximate inference” put together by Dan Simpson. Since both Nicky and Sylvia were alas unable to attend MCMSki, I chaired their session, which I found most interesting ... [Read more...]

MCMSki IV is about to start! While further participants may still register (registration is still open!), we are currently 223 registered participants, without accompanying people. I do hope most of these managed to reach the town of Chamonix-Mont-Blanc despite the foul weather on the East Coast. Unfortunately, three speakers (so far) ... [Read more...]

We are a few days from the start, here are the latest items of information for the participants: The shuttle transfer on January 5th, from Geneva Airport to Chamonix lasts 1 hour 30 minutes. At your arrival in the airport , follow the “Swiss Exit”. After the customs, the bus driver (handling a ... [Read more...]

I am now in Chamonix, a week before MCMSki IV. The town is packed with tourists from all over Europe, English being the dominant language. There is not much snow so far, even though some runs reach town. (I did ski in the nearby Les Houches today and the red ... [Read more...]

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The programs of the talks, posters and workshop are now printed and available on Speaker Deck (talks, posters, workshop). Please let me know if you spot anything wrong (even though it will not be reprinted!). This is presumably the last news item till Jan. 5 as I am almost off to ... [Read more...]

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While in Warwick last week, one evening after having exhausted my laptop battery, I tried the following Sudoku (from Libération): and could not even start. As it happened, this was a setting with no deterministic move, i.e. all free/empty entries had multiple possible values. So after trying ... [Read more...]

Following a now well-established pattern, let me (re)warn (the few) unwary ‘Og readers that the links to Amazon.com and to Amazon.fr found on this blog are actually susceptible to earn me a monetary gain [from 4% to 8% on the sales] if a purchase is made by the reader ... [Read more...]

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This post follows the original one on the headline of the USA Today I read during my flight to Toronto last month. I remind you that the unusual pattern was about observing four U.S. mass murders happening within four days, “for the first time in at least seven years”. ... [Read more...]

Jeong Eun (Kate) Lee and I completed this paper, “Importance sampling schemes for evidence approximation in mixture models“, now posted on arXiv. (With the customary one-day lag for posting, making me bemoan the days of yore when arXiv would give a definitive arXiv number at the time of submission.) Kate ... [Read more...]

We are converging towards MCMSki IV getting closer and closer to the conference! I hope that by now all intended participants have registered (registration is still open!), found a place where to stay during and around the conference (still feasible!), and booked their flight to Geneva (or nearby). First, please ... [Read more...]

Here are two exercises I wrote for my R mid-term exam in Paris-Dauphine around Buffon’s needle problem. In the end, the problems sounded too long and too hard for my 3rd year students so I opted for softer questions. So recycle those if you wish (but do not ask ... [Read more...]