statistics posts

2022, a new scientific adventure: machine learning for health and social sciences

A retrospective on last year (2022): I embarked on a new scientific adventure, assembling a team focused on developing machine learning for health and social science. The team has existed for almost a year, and the vision is nice shaping up. Let me share with you illustrations of where we …

2021 highlight: Decoding brain activity to new cognitive paradigms

Broad decoding models that can specialize to discriminate closely-related mental process with limited data

TL;DR

Decoding models can help isolating which mental processes are implied by the activation of given brain structures. But to support a broad conclusion, they must be trained on many studies, a difficult problem given …

2020: my scientific year in review

The year 2020 has undoubtedly been interesting: the covid19 pandemic stroke while I was on a work sabbatical in Montréal, at the MNI and the MILA, and it pushed further my interest in machine learning for health-care. My highlights this year revolve around basic and applied data-science for health.

Highlights …

2019: my scientific year in review

My current research spans wide: from brain sciences to core data science. My overall interest is to build methodology drawing insights from data for questions that have often been addressed qualitatively. If I can highlight a few publications from 2019 [1], the common thread would be computational statistics, from dirty …

Comparing distributions: Kernels estimate good representations, l1 distances give good tests

Note

Given two set of observations, are they drawn from the same distribution? Our paper Comparing distributions: l1 geometry improves kernel two-sample testing at the NeurIPS 2019 conference revisits this classic statistical problem known as “two-sample testing”.

This post explains the context and the paper with a bit of hand …

The problems of low statistical power and publication bias

Lately, I have been a mood of scientific scepticism: I have the feeling that the worldwide academic system is more and more failing to produce useful research. Christophe Lalanne’s twitter feed lead me to an interesting article in a non-mainstream journal: A farewell to Bonferroni: the problems of low …