2025 Computational Methods in Bayesian Statistics

The University of Florida Department of Statistics’ Annual Winter Workshop will take place on January 17-18, 2025 (Friday-Saturday). The workshop will be in-person in the Reitz Union Auditorium. Bayesian computation is facing many challenges due to the increasing complexity of the models and problems that need to be addressed andthe size of the data sets that are being collected. Subthemes of the workshop are MCMC methods, for which theoretical underpinnings are strong but which can struggle with massive data sets; and variational Bayes methods, which can handle many kinds of massive problems, but are not guaranteed to converge to correct values. This workshop will bring together top researchers who work on both methodological developments in Bayesian computation and applications of Bayesian methods to major scientific problems. A major purpose of the workshop is to discuss the many recent significant developments in Bayesian computation and to identify important problems and new research directions. All sessions are plenary.