Robin Ryder

Photo of Christian Robert, Antoine Luciano, and Robin Ryder

Antoine will be spending the next few months in Berkeley. You should definitely try to hire him as a postdoc!

The third project is ongoing, on using some neural network methods to accelerate ABC.

The second project is on using permutations for Approximate Bayesian Computation, see this thread.

bsky.app/profile/robi...

Insufficient Gibbs sampling - Statistics and Computing In some applied scenarios, the availability of complete data is restricted, often due to privacy concerns; only aggregated, robust and inefficient statistics derived from the data are made accessible....

Antoine's PhD consists of 3 separate projects.

The first, Insufficient Gibbs Sampling, relies on data augmentation to sample from the posterior based only on robust but insufficient statistics (e.g. the median, quantiles…), a common situation when privacy matters.

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Photo of 2026 PhD thesis by Antoine Luciano, with title "Contributions à l'inférence bayésienne par simulation"

Congratulations to Dr Antoine Luciano, who defended his PhD on "Contributions to Bayesian Simulation-Based Inference"!

I had a wonderful time supervising Antoine's PhD (jointly with Christian Robert), it's always emotional to reach the end.

Something like this could be useful when reviewing though. If there are hallucinated references, I'd reject without reading any further.
But of course we don't have access to the .bib file directly for papers we are reviewing.

Thanks, that looks super relevant! I'll forward it to Jinyuan

Now en route to Paris for another PhD viva tomorrow: Antoine Luciano, supervised by Xian Robert and myself. Stay tuned!

The associated paper isn't online yet, so you'll have to be patient to read it. Code should soon be available, since that's one of the corrections we requested. ;-)

Output of an HMM, showing the Posterior probability of each word in Good Omens being written by Neil Gaiman.

Jinyuan's methodology, based on HMMs, is a significant improvement on the state of the art, and also allows for better uncertainty quantification.
Here is what the output can look like, for Good Omens - notice the very large number of switches between the two authors.

Examples of applications:
* the novel "Good Omens" was co-written by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. Who wrote which parts?
* take text written partly by a human and partly by a LLM. Which parts are due to the LLM?

Photo of a PhD thesis with title "Sequential Stylometry: A Bayesian Stylometry Framework for Mixed Authorship Texts", by Jinyuan Zhang (University of Edinburgh, 2025)

Congratulations to Dr Jinyuan Zhang, who defended his PhD in Edinburgh today! I was happy to be the external examiner.

Jinyuan worked on Hidden Markov Models for Stylometry, to attribute authorship in texts with several authors.

The thesis was supervised by Gordon Ross.

This etymology is wild!

#TIL The English word “average”, originally “custom duty” or “loss in transported goods”, comes from the French “avarie” (meaning “damage to a ship or cargo”) from the Italian “avaria” (same meaning), …

The Fréchet mean was computed only a small phylogenies (≤8 leaves). We don't know much yet about the properties of this summary. I'll be interested to see whether it can be used in practice to summarize samples of trees.

Another contribution is the definition of a Wasserstein distance over these sets of trees, including with different sets of leaves.

An important contribution of Roan's thesis is to study the properties of the Fréchet mean of trees. They showed that this can be defined, although not always uniquely. They obtain several theoretical results, such as a Law of Large Numbers and a CLT.

The tropical geometry point of view is a different representation of phylogenetic trees. By considering trees in this space, Roan was able to define a notion of average, which is very different to the summaries we are used to in phylogenetics (consensus trees, MAP, MCC…)

Photo of Roan Talbut's PhD thesis

Congratulations to Dr Roan Talbut, who successfully defended their PhD on "Tropical Geometry for Phylogenetic Statistics"!

It was a pleasure to read the thesis and examine the viva. I learned a lot!

Statistics and Computing Statistics and Computing is a bi-monthly refereed journal publishing papers at the intersection of statistical and computing sciences. Addresses the use of ...

I'm happy to join the board of Statistics and Computing as Associate Editor!

link.springer.com/journal/1122...

I'll be in great company, with lots of fantastic colleagues. And congratulations to my old friend and fellow bird enthusiast @pierrealquier.bsky.social who has also just joined as AE!

Still think this was one of the best power moves of all time

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Please Avoid detectCores() in your R Packages The detectCores() function of the parallel package is probably one of the most used functions when it comes to setting the number of parallel workers to use in R. In this blog post, I’ll try to explai...

The detectCores() apocalypse is creeping up on us 👻🐛

As more people are getting access to 128+ CPU cores, code spinning up parallel cluster with detectCores() workers fails - not enough #RStats connections available

Friends, do *not* default to detectCores(), bc www.jottr.org/2022/12/05/a...

Contrasting modes of cultural evolution: Kra-Dai languages and weaving technologies | Evolutionary Human Sciences | Cambridge Core Contrasting modes of cultural evolution: Kra-Dai languages and weaving technologies - Volume 7

New article in collaboration with @chrisbuckley.bsky.social , @thomaspellard.bsky.social @robinryder.bsky.social on the phylogeny of Kra-Dai languages and of the looms used by their speakers:

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

We’re hiring!
Join Imperial's Department of Mathematics as an Assistant, Associate or Full Professor in Pure Maths, Applied Maths, Stats or Math Finance.
We have several posts available, so apply by 30 Nov 2025!
imperial.ac.uk/jobs/search-...
@imperialmaths.bsky.social

Absolutely crazy that Harvard had to resort to this.
PhD students are society's future experts. What happens when even elite universities can no longer afford to train them?

Applications are invited for Chapman Fellow in Mathematics (Statistics Section) at the Department of Mathematics.
Closing date: 11 November 2025
www.imperial.ac.uk/jobs//search...

Jolie illustration du paradoxe de Simpson !

Jane Goodall reaches out and touches a small monkey.

Jane Goodall was my first childhood hero, as I loved animals as a kid and was inspired by her story. I still remember the National Geographic specials about her. RIP.

Description Please note that job descriptions are not exhaustive, and you may be asked to take on additional duties that align with the key responsibilities ment...

If the first link does not work, try this one instead:
www.imperial.ac.uk/jobs/search-...

It's a great opportunity for recent PhD graduates who wish to pursue a career in academia.

Salary: in the range £49,017 - £57,472 per annum
Deadline to apply: 11 November.

Please contact me if you have questions!

We are hiring!

We are inviting applications for the Chapman Fellowship in Statistics at Imperial College London.

This is a kind of super-postdoc: 3 years contract, excellent working conditions, and candidates are expected to propose an independent research plan.

www.imperial.ac.uk/jobs//search...