a pseudo-marginal perspective on the ABC algorithm

My friends Luke Bornn, Natesh Pillai and Dawn Woodard just arXived along with Aaron Smith a short note on the convergence properties of ABC. When compared with acceptance-rejection or regular MCMC. Unsurprisingly, ABC does worse in both cases. What is central to this note is that ABC can be (re)interpreted as a pseudo-marginal method where the data comparison step acts like an unbiased estimator of the true ABC target (not of the original ABC target, mind!). From there, it is mostly an application of Christophe Andrieu’s and Matti Vihola’s results in this setup. The authors also argue that using a single pseudo-data simulation per parameter value is the optimal strategy (as compared with using several), when considering asymptotic variance. This makes sense in terms of simulating in a larger dimensional space but what of the cost of producing those pseudo-datasets against the cost of producing a new parameter? There are a few (rare) cases where the datasets are much cheaper to produce.