likelihood-free inference by ratio estimation

“This approach for posterior estimation with generative models mirrors the approach of Gutmann and Hyvärinen (2012) for the estimation of unnormalised models. The main difference is that here we classify between two simulated data sets while Gutmann and Hyvärinen (2012) classified between the observed data and simulated reference data.” A 2018 arXiv posting by Owen […]

conditional noise contrastive estimation

At ICML last year, Ciwan Ceylan and Michael Gutmann presented a new version of noise constrative estimation to deal with intractable constants. While noise contrastive estimation relies upon a second independent sample to contrast with the observed sample, this approach uses instead a perturbed or noisy version of the original sample, for instance a Normal […]

thermodynamic integration plus temperings

Biljana Stojkova and David Campbel recently arXived a paper on the used of parallel simulated tempering for thermodynamic integration towards producing estimates of marginal likelihoods. Resulting into a rather unwieldy acronym of PT-STWNC for “Parallel Tempering – Simulated Tempering Without Normalizing Constants”. Remember that parallel tempering runs T chains in parallel for T different powers […]

noise contrastive estimation

As I was attending Lionel Riou-Durand’s PhD thesis defence in ENSAE-CREST last week, I had a look at his papers (!). The 2018 noise contrastive paper is written with Nicolas Chopin (both authors share the CREST affiliation with me). Which compares Charlie Geyer’s 1994 bypassing the intractable normalising constant problem by virtue of an artificial […]

indecent exposure

While attending my last session at MCqMC 2018, in Rennes, before taking a train back to Paris, I was confronted by this radical opinion upon our previous work with Matt Moores (Warwick) and other coauthors from QUT, where the speaker, Maksym Byshkin from Lugano, defended a new approach for maximum likelihood estimation using novel MCMC […]