Bert van der Veen

If we ask very nicely, I'm sure Pekka would be willing to apply extended variational for a dirichilet gllvm.What do you think @sarataskinen.bsky.social? I vaguely recall this being discussed in a recent meeting.

The cabin is in the middle of the woods, so plenty of birds to spot including Coal tit, Crested tit, blue tit, Spotted woodpecker, and Nuthatch. All of course recorded to #eBird!

The outdoor shower was not so happy with our pack of presence in combination with freezing temperatures...

Last time at our cabin in Oppdal for a while, before the big move to Bayreuth. Hopefully we will be back next winter at least, then with snow 😀

Verkiezingsavond met noorderlicht. Voorbode voor een goed resultaat? 😀

Ron Ronald Togunov, Simen Knutsen Furset, Martin Emil Pettersen, Robert Brian O'Hara
Unbiased likelihood estimation of the Langevin diffusion for animal movement modelling
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.24539

Success! Ik heb vanuit het buitenland op je gestemd 😀

Project | E5 Doctoral Training Partnership | E5 Doctoral Training Partnership The project advertisement

Second PhD alert:

Advertising a second PhD alongside Amanda Lenzi (lead) and Finn Lindgren on: 'Forecasting nature’s calendar: Joint probabilistic models of phenology in space and time'. Also competition funded through the E5 DTP at Uni of Edinburgh.

e5-dtp.ed.ac.uk/project?item...

alt="Schematic of a graph of a population trajectory for blue tits that is known for half of the x-axis (time) and then forecasted with uncertainty. Above the population trajectory are some weather images (a sun and some rain) they have connections to the population size but the path is unknown. "

PhD advert alert!

Come work with me at Edinburgh.

I'm advertising a PhD on: "Predicting responses of birds to climate change", competition funded through the E5 DTP. Would suit those with an interest in predicting responses to climate change, birds, or both.

e5-dtp.ed.ac.uk/project?item...

The next International Statistical Ecology Conference (ISEC) will take place on January 8-15, 2027, in Mérida, México.

Calls for workshop and roundtable proposals now open, deadline Nov 15, 2025 (anywhere on earth).

Visit statisticalecology.org for more information. 🧪

Please share widely 📈🦋🐾

🌿 Great energy at the 17th BayCEER Workshop 2025! 🌿

A day of sharing research, ideas, and inspiration across ecology and environmental sciences.

www.bayceer.uni-bayreuth.de/ws2025/

#BayCEER #Workshop #Ecology

@unibayreuth.bsky.social
@luederslab.bsky.social

Plaatje van het kieskompas uit 2021. Valt dus best mee volgens mij.

Cake?

Yesterday was my last day at NTNU. It marks the end of a long and prlducutive period (2017-2025) with @bobohara.bsky.social.

I'm happy to be able to share that I will now be moving to @unibayreuth.bsky.social for a new position with Steve Higgins 😁.

Splines, B-splines, P-splines, and a disapproving kitten – Notes from a data witch No, I do not care about splines. But I am trying to learn about GAMLSS regression, and yes, it is to this dark place that this topic has taken me

At the risk of stretching the imagination beyond the limits of human endurance, the reader is asked to pretend that the author is interested in splines #rstats

We are seeking a postdoctoral researcher in statistics to develop methods for analyzing large scale biodiversity and ecosystem function data at the University of Helsinki.

This is a great opportunity for someone who wants to do advanced Bayesian modeling with direct link to real world applications.

#rstats For a paper I am looking for go-to examples or demonstrations of complementary log-log models in ecology, preferably with publicly available data. Any recommendations?

PhD Research Fellow in global change ecology (285493) | University of Bergen Job title: PhD Research Fellow in global change ecology (285493), Employer: University of Bergen, Deadline: Wednesday, October 1, 2025

Come work with us!

Fully funded #PhD position in global change ecology - working in a cross-disciplinary cohort of 8 PhD students studying mountains in transition. 🧪🌐🏔️ @btwnthefjords-uib.bsky.social @cesam-uib.bsky.social

www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...

A diagram titled "Ecological Network Optimisation" with attractive landscapes and networks and very clear AI-generation artifacts.

Check out the graphical abstract for a paper recently published in Ecological Modelling.

I have papers published in Ecological Modelling. Never again, I guess.

This position sounds great! Except the teaching in Finnish part, that considerably narrows down the potential pool of applicants.

Thanks, I'll keep that in mind! Learning the language shouldn't be a problem, given that I am Dutch.

An R package for working with generalized additive models Graceful 'ggplot'-based graphics and utility functions for working with generalized additive models (GAMs) fitted using the 'mgcv' package.

🚀 gratia 0.11.0 is out!

Now has a paper in JOSS — please cite 📄 doi.org/10.21105/jos...

Experimental parallel processing ⚡

New assemble() for building plots 🎨

Better support for complex families + new diagnostics 🧪

Lots of bug fixes + polish ✨

👉 gavinsimpson.github.io/gratia/

#Rstats

The struct() defines the RHS correlation matrix while the LHS formula defines (as usual) a covariance in terms of lme4-style for the REs.

I'm not sure if I am breaking/abusing the usual random-effect syntax, but it seemed sensible to me (does #glmmTMB do something similar @bbolker.bsky.social?).

Still plugging away at this. I've now expanded this idea of a kronecker covariance over the whole random effect for all structures in the glmmVA interface, i.e., also for corExp, corMatern, corAR1 and corCS, so that you can do things like corCS(a+b|group).

I'm sure this is useful for some reason.

Gaussian Variational Approximate Inference for Generalized Linear Mixed Models Variational approximation methods have become a mainstay of contemporary machine learning methodology, but currently have little presence in statistics. We devise an effective variational approxim...

There are papers that discuss the difference in the estinstors in more detail. Ormerod and Wand www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... for example.

There are situations where the approximations are different, and one need not expect the same answer from a model.

That's an excellent question. I don't have anything prepared, but I've had a few use cases where laplace of zero-inflated models did not converge well.

A lot of our evidence is anecdotal, though we've done extensive simulation on LA and VA performance for LVMs.

An excellent course! Thanks so much for organising and running it, Bert & the whole team! Keeping my fingers crossed that there will be another one like it in the not too distant future, I can warmly recommend it!

Thanks for the positive feedback Markus, and thanks for participating 😁

Many bugfixes and updates later... This will probably happen a few times. I've also added a propto() structure, which can be combined with a correlation matrix for random effects, forming a kronecker covariance structure where the column matrix is fixed.