Gaurav Sood writes: Often enough, scientists are left with the unenviable task of conducting an orchestra with out-of-tune instruments. They are charged with telling a coherent story about noisy results. Scientists defer to the demand partly because there is a widespread belief that a journal article is the appropriate grouping variable at which results...

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to evaluate MCMC samplers. A common way to do this is to run one or more iterations of your contender against a baseline of something simple, something well understood, or more rarely, the current champion (which seems to remain NUTS, though we’re open to suggestions for alternatives). Reporting comparisons of averages...

Oscar Oelrich, Shutong Ding, Måns Magnusson, Aki Vehtari, and Mattias Villani write: Bayesian model comparison is often based on the posterior distribution over the set of compared models. This distribution is often observed to concentrate on a single model even when other measures of model fit or forecasting ability indicate no strong preference....

Matthieu Domenech de Cellès writes: I am a research group leader in infectious disease epidemiology at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin. I read your recent post on how to respond to fatally flawed papers. Here is a personal anecdote from my field, which you might find interesting. The flawed paper in question was published...

Adam Connor-Sax sent this question to Philip Greengard: Do you or anyone you know work with or know about (human) population forecasting in small geographies (election districts) and short timescales (2-20 years)? I can imagine just looking at the past couple years and trying to extrapolate but presumably there are models of population dynamics which...

I’m pleased as Punch to announce our new paper, Nawaf Bou-Rabee, Bob Carpenter, and Milo Marsden. 2024. GIST: Gibbs self-tuning for locally adaptive Hamiltonian Monte Carlo. arXiv 2404.15253. We followed the mathematician alphabetical author-ordering convention. The basic idea The basic idea is so simple, I’m surprised it’s not more popular....