William Laplante

I’m a second-year PhD student at University College London (UCL) and part of the Fundamentals of Statistical Machine Learning group.

I’m supervised by François-Xavier Briol as well as Andrew Duncan and Jeremias Knoblauch. My studies are co-funded by UCL’s Centre for Doctoral Training in Data-Intensive Science, the Department of Statistical Science at UCL, and the Alan Turing Institute’s Program for Fundamental Research in Data Science and AI.

Before my PhD, I was part of the Financial Engineering & Modelling team at Deloitte, and worked in the Global Securities Funding division (previously Global Equity Derivatives) at National Bank Financial. I completed a Master’s degree in Statistics at the University of British Columbia and graduated from the Joint Honours in Mathematics and Physics program at McGill University for my undergraduate studies.

News

Dec 01, 2025	Finished writing my second paper, Conjugate Generalised Bayesian Inference for Discrete Doubly Intractable Problems!
May 01, 2025	Collaborated with The Guardian through UCL’s Data Intensive Science PhD program to improve their editorial style guide checker with LLMs.
Apr 07, 2025	Presenting a session with discussion at The Bayesian Young Statisticians Meeting (BAYSM) 2025.
Mar 07, 2025	Presenting Robust and Conjugate Spatio-Temporal Gaussian Processes at the Oxford Man Institute of Quantitative Finance.
Jan 31, 2025	Finished writing my first paper, Robust and Conjugate Spatio-Temporal Gaussian Processes!

Selected Publications

Preprint

Conjugate Generalised Bayesian Inference for Discrete Doubly Intractable Problems

William Laplante, Matias Altamirano, Jeremias Knoblauch, and 2 more authors

arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.23275, 2025

arXiv Bib

@article{laplante2025robust,
  title = {Conjugate Generalised Bayesian Inference for Discrete Doubly Intractable Problems},
  author = {Laplante, William and Altamirano, Matias and Knoblauch, Jeremias and Duncan, Andrew and Briol, Fran{\c{c}}ois-Xavier},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.23275},
  year = {2025},
}

ICML

Robust and Conjugate Spatio-Temporal Gaussian Processes

William Laplante, Matias Altamirano, Andrew Duncan, and 2 more authors

In International Conference on Machine Learning, 2025

arXiv Bib Code

@inproceedings{laplante2025robusu,
  title = {Robust and Conjugate Spatio-Temporal Gaussian Processes},
  author = {Laplante, William and Altamirano, Matias and Duncan, Andrew and Knoblauch, Jeremias and Briol, Fran{\c{c}}ois-Xavier},
  booktitle = {International Conference on Machine Learning},
  year = {2025},
}