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Robin Ryder

@robinryder

Mathematician at Imperial College London. Bayesian statistics, Data science, Languages, Phylogenies.

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18.11.2024
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Latest posts by Robin Ryder @robinryder

Est-ce que l'échelle des ordonnées ne serait pas erronée ?
Si j'en crois le texte de l'article, l'effet après 20 ans est de 1.28%, mais d'après la figure ce serait 0.0128%

07.03.2026 19:19 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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"Quand les bars-tabacs ferment : l’érosion du lien social local et la progression du vote d’extrême droite en France" www.cepremap.fr/2026/01/quan...
file:///Users/arthurcharpentier/Downloads/Figure_1-Note.png

07.03.2026 12:06 👍 9 🔁 10 💬 2 📌 0
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What a pre-conference workshop on Bayesian statistical methods—a powerful toolkit for our community! 📊

Many thanks to Daniel Redhead and Ramona Roller for guiding us through STRAND and to Michael Chimento for the introduction to STbayes.

And thank you to all participants for their energy! 🙌

02.03.2026 14:35 👍 13 🔁 8 💬 1 📌 0
PearTree — Phylogenetic Tree Viewer

So I pleased to announce the conceptual spawn of FigTree: PearTree (acronym still to be finalised). If you want to dive right in it is hosted as a web app here: artic-network.github.io/peartree (click the “Example...” button for immediate candy and then click every button you can find).

28.02.2026 19:01 👍 160 🔁 99 💬 5 📌 4
Front cover of my book, titled "Comparative musicology: Evolution, universals, and the science of the world's music" (published today by Oxford University Press)

Front cover of my book, titled "Comparative musicology: Evolution, universals, and the science of the world's music" (published today by Oxford University Press)

1st of my 4-page essay published in Nature today titled "Music is not a universal language - but it can bring us together when words fail"
Picture caption: "Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny (centre) performed in Spanish at the half-time show of the 2026 American Football Super Bowl LX."

1st of my 4-page essay published in Nature today titled "Music is not a universal language - but it can bring us together when words fail" Picture caption: "Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny (centre) performed in Spanish at the half-time show of the 2026 American Football Super Bowl LX."

My book is now published! 🌏🎶🧪

You can download it for free at academic.oup.com/book/62353 - I’d be grateful if you do!
I also published an accessible summary with audio/video today in @nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Try reading that first, then give the whole book a read if you like it!

23.02.2026 12:10 👍 108 🔁 50 💬 8 📌 5

So cool!
Mostly fine until 1300, understood a fair bit of 1200, and close to nothing in 1100

22.02.2026 13:11 👍 4 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

I guess if you want to see what it adds compared to your current version, you need to apply setdiff to the output of that and to your current list of (recursive) dependencies.

18.02.2026 00:19 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

tools::package_dependencies("packagename", recursive=T)

18.02.2026 00:16 👍 4 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Photo of Christian Robert, Antoine Luciano, and 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!

27.01.2026 17:56 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

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

27.01.2026 17:56 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

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

bsky.app/profile/robi...

27.01.2026 17:56 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
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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...

27.01.2026 17:56 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Photo of 2026 PhD thesis by Antoine Luciano, with title "Contributions à l'inférence bayésienne par simulation"

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.

27.01.2026 17:56 👍 4 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

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.

26.01.2026 11:32 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

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

21.01.2026 21:58 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

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

21.01.2026 20:27 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

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. ;-)

21.01.2026 20:27 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Output of an HMM, showing the Posterior probability of each word in Good Omens being written by Neil Gaiman.

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.

21.01.2026 20:27 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

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?

21.01.2026 20:27 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Photo of a PhD thesis with title "Sequential Stylometry: A Bayesian Stylometry Framework for Mixed Authorship Texts", by Jinyuan Zhang (University of Edinburgh, 2025)

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.

21.01.2026 20:27 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 2 📌 0

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), …

07.01.2026 00:34 👍 18 🔁 14 💬 3 📌 0

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.

12.12.2025 14:33 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

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

12.12.2025 14:33 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

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.

12.12.2025 14:33 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

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…)

12.12.2025 14:33 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Photo of Roan Talbut's PhD thesis

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!

12.12.2025 11:53 👍 4 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
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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!

05.12.2025 18:29 👍 11 🔁 0 💬 2 📌 0
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Still think this was one of the best power moves of all time

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

12.11.2025 00:32 👍 318 🔁 65 💬 8 📌 9
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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...

05.11.2025 23:55 👍 47 🔁 23 💬 2 📌 2
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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...

05.11.2025 13:08 👍 11 🔁 7 💬 0 📌 1