Yesterday, Bálint Tóth (University of Bristol and Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics) came to Paris Dauphine for a seminar on the Botlzmann-Grad limit and the existence of a central (double) limit theory. Which was somewhat related with the above video of an earlier seminar, albeit without the first part on the historical roots of the problem. This was a brilliant talk as quite accessible to the entirety of the lab, while providing detailed entries on the mechanism leading to the CLT, in particular the substitution of the physical process by a Markovian(ised) process that stayed closed eno ..read more

Flip a fair coin 100 times, resulting in a sequence of heads (H) and tails (T). For each HH in the sequence, Alice gets a point; for each HT, Bob does, so e.g. for the subsequence THHHT Alice gets 2 points and Bob gets 1 point. Who is most likely to win? An interesting conundrum in that the joint distribution of (A,B) need be considered for showing that Bob is more likely. Indeed, looking at the marginals does not help since the probability of the base events is the same. A solution on X validated (for a question posted when the Fiddler’s puzzle came out, Friday morn) demonstrates via a four ..read more

The registration for BAYSM 2024 is now officially open. The Bayesian Young Statistician Meeting will take place in Ca’Foscari on 29 and 30 June, 2024, prior to the ISBA meeting. Early bird registration is available till 10 May and for a very low fee that includes lunches and a reception, terrificò! (Note that dedicated childcare is furthermore available.) And note that the early bird registration for the World ISBA meeting has also been extended to 01 May ..read more

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A fellow coder shared with me this recent manual (in French) entitled python (for the computer language, not the snake) written by Nathalie Azoulai  as he found it an interesting literary (if not computer) program. It parses rather quickly and I compiled it in one single run on my way to Bristol [Mecca of punched card coders!] last week. The core idea of this manual is one of a middle-aged, clueless (about coding), single-mother, writer engaging into an experiment to understand coding and coders. She does not succeed. And the manual also fails to implement said idea, at least for me. This ..read more

Sirio Legramanti, Daniele Durante, and Pierre Alquier just arXived a massive paper on the concentration of discrepancy–based ABC posteriors via Rademacher complexity, which includes MMD and Wasserstein distance-based ABC methods. The paper provides sufficient conditions under which a discrepancy within the integral probability semimetrics class guarantees uniform convergence and concentration of the induced ABC posterior, without necessarily requiring suitable regularity conditions for the underlying data generating process and the assumed statistical model, meaning that they also cover misspe ..read more

arXiv is now testing a new display of papers in html format to increase accessibility [for those with no pdf reader?] Hopefully, this will not induce further constraints on the LaTeX format of arXiv submissions, at a time when it got easier for off-the-shelf files to be immediately accepted, but the fact that the site encourages using Overleaf is not that promising… (The plea that readers do not create reports that the HTML paper doesn’t look exactly like the PDF paper is hilarious, as I presume many complained of exactly this drawback ..read more

A rather strange incident occurred to me this morn as I was optimising my backpack for my trip to Bristol. I found inside a stash of credit card receipts along with a booklet of down-town Paris metro tickets. As I hardly ever keep credit card receipts, I was rather surprised at it and, looking through them, the more because I could not place these purchases, although they mostly were spent in the neighbourhood of the former INSEE building in Malakoff. Checking further at the end digits of the credit card, I realised these were not agreeing with mine and thus that they had mysteriously ended u ..read more

Just recently, I came across this representation of the (global) temperature rise over the period 1850-2020, made by Professor Ed Hawkins from the University of Reading. It is powerful, artsy, reminding me of the Everything mural in the Zeeman Building at the University of Warwick, and visually most appealing, as a poster about the urgency for action, but it nonetheless remain a poor statistical graph in that it is a 2d presentation of a 1d dataset, the time series of the yearly average temperatures, missing the opportunity to exploit the second axis by eg taking a stripe of the Earth from Sou ..read more

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