IDS.190 – Topics in Bayesian Modeling and Computation Abstract: MCMC methods yield approximations that converge to quantities of interest in the limit of the number of iterations. This iterative asymptotic justification is not ideal: it stands at odds with current trends in computing hardware. Namely, it would often be computationally preferable to run many short chains in parallel, but such an approach is flawed because of the so-called "burn-in" bias.  This talk will first describe that issue and some known…

IDS.190 – Topics in Bayesian Modeling and Computation Speaker: Daniel Simpson (University of Toronto) Abstract: As data becomes more complex and computational modelling becomes more powerful, we rapidly find ourselves beyond the scope of traditional statistical theory. As we venture beyond the traditional thunderdome, we need to think about how to cope with this additional complexity in our model building.  In this talk, I will talk about a few techniques that are useful when specifying prior distributions and building Bayesian models…

IDS.190 – Topics in Bayesian Modeling and Computation **PLEASE NOTE ROOM CHANGE TO BUILDING 37-212 FOR THE WEEKS OF 10/30 AND 11/6** Speaker:   Jonathan Huggins (Boston University) Abstract: Standard Bayesian inference is known to be sensitive to misspecification between the model and the data-generating mechanism, leading to unreliable uncertainty quantification and poor predictive performance. However, finding generally applicable and computationally feasible methods for robust Bayesian inference under misspecification has proven to be a difficult challenge. An intriguing approach is…

IDS.190 – Topics in Bayesian Modeling and Computation **PLEASE NOTE ROOM CHANGE TO BUILDING 37-212 FOR THE WEEKS OF 10/30 AND 11/6** Speaker: Lester Mackey (Microsoft Research) Abstract: Stein’s method is a powerful tool from probability theory for bounding the distance between probability distributions.  In this talk, I’ll describe how this tool designed to prove central limit theorems can be adapted to assess and improve the quality of practical inference procedures.  I’ll highlight applications to Markov chain sampler selection, goodness-of-fit testing, variational…

Abstract: Advances in Markov chain Monte Carlo in the past 30 years have made Bayesian analysis a routine practice. However, there is virtually no practice of performing Monte Carlo integration from the Bayesian perspective; indeed,this problem has earned the “paradox” label in the context of computing normalizing constants (Wasserman, 2013). We first use the modeling-what-we-ignore idea of Kong et al. (2003) to explain that the crux of the paradox is not with the likelihood theory, which is essentially the same…