“There are three common approaches for selecting the tolerance sequence (…) [they] can lead to inefficient sampling”
Umberto Simola, Jessi Cisewski-Kehe, Michael Gutmann and Jukka Corander recently arXived a paper entitled Adaptive Approximate Bayesian Computation Tolerance Selection. I appreciate that they start from our ABC-PMC paper, i.e., Beaumont et al. (2009) [although the representation that the ABC tolerances are fixed in advance is somewhat incorrect in that we used in our codes quantiles of the distances to set our tolerances.] This is also the approach advocated for the initialisation step by the current paper. Although remaining a wee bit vague. Subsequent steps are based on the proximity between the resulting approximations to the ABC posteriors, more exactly with a quantile derived from the maximum of the ratio between two estimated successive ABC posteriors. Mimicking the Accept-Reject step if always one step too late. The iteration stops when the ratio is almost one, possibly missing the target due to Monte Carlo variability. (Recall that the “optimal” tolerance is not zero for a finite sample size.)
“…the decrease in the acceptance rate is mitigated by the improvement in the proposed particles.”
A problem is that it depends on the form of the approximation and requires non-parametric hence imprecise steps. Maybe variational encoders could help. Interesting approach by Sugiyama et al. (2012), of which I knew nothing, the core idea being that the ratio of two densities is also the solution to minimising a distance between the numerator density and a variable function times the bottom density. However since only the maximum of the ratio is needed, a more focused approach could be devised. Rather than first approximating the ratio and second maximising the estimated ratio. Maybe the solution of Goffinet et al. (1992) on estimating an accept-reject constant could work.
A further comment is that the estimated density is not properly normalised, which lessens the Accept-Reject analogy since the optimum may well stand above one. And thus stop “too soon”. (Incidentally, the paper contains the mixture example of Sisson et al. (2007), for which our own graphs were strongly criticised during our Biometrika submission!)
