Michael Jordan’s course at CREST

Next month, Michael Jordan will give an advanced course at CREST-ENSAE, Paris, on Recent Advances at the Interface of Computation and Statistics. The course will take place on April 4 (14:00, ENSAE, Room #11), 11 (14:00, ENSAE, Room #11), 15 (11:00, ENSAE, Room #11) and 18 (14:00, ENSAE, Room #11). It is open to everyone and attendance is free. The only constraint is a compulsory registration with Nadine Guedj (email: guedj[AT]ensae.fr) for security issues. I strongly advise all graduate students who can take advantage of this fantastic opportunity to grasp it! Here is the abstract to the course:

“I will discuss several recent developments in areas where statistical science meets computational science, with particular concern for bringing statistical inference into contact with distributed computing architectures and with recursive data structures :

1. How does one obtain confidence intervals in massive data sets? The bootstrap principle suggests resampling data to obtain fluctuations in the values of estimators, and thereby confidence intervals, but this is infeasible computationally with massive data. Subsampling the data yields fluctuations on the wrong scale, which have to be corrected to provide calibrated statistical inferences. I present a new procedure, the “bag of little bootstraps,” which circumvents this problem, inheriting the favorable theoretical properties of the bootstrap but also having a much more favorable computational profile.

2. The problem of matrix completion has been the focus of much recent work, both theoretical and practical. To take advantage of distributed computing architectures in this setting, it is natural to consider divide-and-conquer algorithms for matrix completion. I show that these work well in practice, but also note that new theoretical problems arise when attempting to characterize the statistical performance of these algorithms. Here the theoretical support is provided by concentration theorems for random matrices, and I present a new approach to matrix concentration based on Stein’s method.

3. Bayesian nonparametrics involves replacing the “prior distributions” of classical Bayesian analysis with “prior stochastic processes.” Of particular value are the class of “combinatorial stochastic processes,” which make it possible to express uncertainty (and perform inference) over combinatorial objects that are familiar as data structures in computer science.”

References are available on Michael’s homepage.

Ibragimov in Paris

On Monday, Ildar Ibragimov (St.Petersburg Department of Steklov Mathematical Institute, Russia) will give a seminar at CREST on “The Darmois – Skitovich and Ghurye – Olkin theorems revisited“. This sounds more like probability than statistics, as those theorems state that, if two linear combinations of iid rv’s are independent, then those rv’s are normal. See those remarks by Prof. Abram Kagan for historical details. Nonetheless, I find it quite an event to have a local seminar given by one of the fathers of asymptotic Bayesian theory. Here is the abstract to the talk. (The talk will be at ENSAE, Salle S8, at 3pm on Monday, March 18.)

mostly nuisance, little interest

Sorry for the misleading if catchy (?) title, I mean mostly nuisance parameters, very few parameters of interest! This morning I attended a talk by Eric Lesage from CREST-ENSAI on non-responses in surveys and their modelling through instrumental variables. The weighting formula used to compensate for the missing values was exactly the one at the core of the Robins-Wasserman paradox, discussed a few weeks ago by Jamie in Varanasi. Namely the one with the estimated probability of response at the denominator: The solution adopted in the talk was obviously different, with linear estimators used at most steps to evaluate the bias of the procedure (since researchers in survey sampling seem particularly obsessed with bias!)

On a somehow related topic, Aris Spanos arXived a short note (that I read yesterday) about the Neyman-Scott paradox. The problem is similar to the Robins-Wasserman paradox in that there is an infinity of nuisance parameters (the means of the successive pairs of observations) and that a convergent estimator of the parameter of interest, namely the variance common to all observations, is available. While there exist Bayesian solutions to this problem (see, e.g., this paper by Brunero Liseo), they require some preliminary steps to bypass the difficulty of this infinite number of parameters and, in this respect, are involving ad-hocquery to some extent, because the prior is then designed purposefully so. In other words, missing the direct solution based on the difference of the pairs is a wee frustrating, even though this statistic is not sufficient! The above paper by Brunero also my favourite example in this area: when considering a normal mean in large dimension, if the parameter of interest is the squared norm of this mean, the MLE ||x||² (and the Bayes estimator associated with Jeffreys’ prior) is (are) very poor: the bias is constant and of the order of the dimension of the mean, p. On the other hand, if one starts from ||x||² as the observation (definitely in-sufficient!), the resulting MLE (and the Bayes estimator associated with Jeffreys’ prior) has (have) much nicer properties. (I mentioned this example in my review of Chang’s book as it is paradoxical, gaining in efficiency by throwing away “information”! Of course, the part we throw away does not contain true information about the norm, but the likelihood does not factorise and hence the Bayesian answers differ…)

I showed the paper to Andrew Gelman and here are his comments:

Spanos writes, “The answer is surprisingly straightforward.” I would change that to, “The answer is unsurprisingly straightforward.” He should’ve just asked me the answer first rather than wasting his time writing a paper!

The way it works is as follows. In Bayesian inference, everything unknown is unknown, they have a joint prior and a joint posterior distribution. In frequentist inference, each unknowns quantity is either a parameter or a predictive quantity. Parameters do not have probability distributions (hence the discomfort that frequentists have with notation such as N(y|m,s); they prefer something like N(y;m,s) or f_N(y;m,s)), while predictions do have probability distributions. In frequentist statistics, you estimate parameters and you predict predictors. In this world, estimation and prediction are different. Estimates are evaluated conditional on the parameter. Predictions are evaluated conditional on model parameters but unconditional on the predictive quantities. Hence, mle can work well in many high-dimensional problems, as long as you consider many of the uncertain quantities as predictive. (But mle is still not perfect because of the problem of boundary estimates, e.g., here..

intrinsic quantity for a Markov chain?

I was attending a lecture this morning at CREST by Patrice Bertail where he was using estimated renewal parameters on a Markov chain to build (asymptotically) convergent bootstrap procedures. Estimating renewal parameters is obviously of interest in MCMC algorithms as they can be used to assess the convergence of the associated Markov chain: That is, if the estimation does not induce a significant bias. Another question that came to me during the talk is that; since those convergence assessments techniques are formally holding for any small set, choosing the small set in order to maximise the renewal rate also maximises the number of renewal events and hence the number of terms in the control sequence: Thus, the maximal renewal rate þ is definitely a quantity of interest: Now, is this quantity þ an intrinsic parameter of the chain, i.e. a quantity that drives its mixing and/or converging behaviour(s)? For instance; an iid sequence has a renewal rate of 1; because the whole set is a “small” set. Informally, the time between two consecutive renewal events is akin to the time between two simulations from the target and stationary distribution, according to the Kac’s representation we used in our AAP paper with Jim Hobert. So it could be that þ is directly related with the effective sample size of the chain, hence the autocorrelation. (A quick web search did not produce anything relevant:) Too bad this question did not pop up last week when I had the opportunity to discuss it with Sean Meyn in Gainesville!

Bayesian computation via empirical likelihood on line. Early.

Our paper on using empirical likelihood for Bayesian computation (with Kerrie Mengersen and Pierre Pudlo) has been accepted by PNAS [after we removed the A from ABCel!], which is terrific news! It has already appeared on-line as early edition in the issue of January 7. Which is also terrific! (Unfortunately, it is not open access, contrary to the previous PNAS paper on ABC model choice as the cost was just too high.)