a unified treatment of predictive model comparison

“Applying various approximation strategies to the relative predictive performance derived from predictive distributions in frequentist and Bayesian inference yields many of the model comparison techniques ubiquitous in practice, from predictive log loss cross validation to the Bayesian evidence and Bayesian information criteria.”

Michael Betancourt (Warwick) just arXived a paper formalising predictive model comparison in an almost Bourbakian sense! Meaning that he adopts therein a very general representation of the issue, with minimal assumptions on the data generating process (excluding a specific metric and obviously the choice of a testing statistic). He opts for an M-open perspective, meaning that this generating process stands outside the hypothetical statistical model or, in Lindley’s terms, a small world. Within this paradigm, the only way to assess the fit of a model seems to be through the predictive performances of that model. Using for instance an f-divergence like the Kullback-Leibler divergence, based on the true generated process as the reference. I think this however puts a restriction on the choice of small worlds as the probability measure on that small world has to be absolutely continuous wrt the true data generating process for the distance to be finite. While there are arguments in favour of absolutely continuous small worlds, this assumes a knowledge about the true process that we simply cannot gather. Ignoring this difficulty, a relative Kullback-Leibler divergence can be defined in terms of an almost arbitrary reference measure. But as it still relies on the true measure, its evaluation proceeds via cross-validation “tricks” like jackknife and bootstrap. However, on the Bayesian side, using the prior predictive links the Kullback-Leibler divergence with the marginal likelihood. And Michael argues further that the posterior predictive can be seen as the unifying tool behind information criteria like DIC and WAIC (widely applicable information criterion). Which does not convince me towards the utility of those criteria as model selection tools, as there is too much freedom in the way approximations are used and a potential for using the data several times.