ABC’ory in Banff [17w5025]

Another great day of talks and discussions at BIRS! Continuing on the themes of the workshop between delving into the further validation of those approximation techniques and the devising of ever more approximate solutions for ever more complex problems. Among the points that came clearer to me through discussion, a realisation that the synthetic likelihood perspective is not that far away from our assumptions in the consistency paper. And that a logistic version of the approach can be constructed as well. A notion I had not met before (or have forgotten I had met) is the one of early rejection ABC, which should actually be investigated more thoroughly as it should bring considerable improvement in computing time (with the caveats of calibrating the acceptance step before producing the learning sample and of characterising the output).  Both Jukka Corander and Ewan Cameron reminded us of the case of models that take minutes or hours to produce one single dataset. (In his talk on some challenging applications, Jukka Corander chose to move from socks to boots!) And Jean-Michel Marin produced an illuminating if sobering experiment on the lack of proper Bayesian coverage by ABC solutions. (It appears that Ewan’s video includes a long empty moment when we went out for the traditional group photo, missing the end of his talk.)