focused Bayesian prediction

In this fourth session of our One World ABC Seminar, my friend and coauthor Gael Martin, gave an after-dinner talk on focused Bayesian prediction, more in the spirit of Bissiri et al. than following a traditional ABC approach.  because along with Ruben Loaiza-Maya and [my friend and coauthor] David Frazier, they consider the possibility of a (mild?) misspecification of the model. Using thus scoring rules à la Gneiting and Raftery. Gael had in fact presented an earlier version at our workshop in Oaxaca, in November 2018. As in other solutions of that kind, difficulty in weighting the score into a distribution. Although asymptotic irrelevance, direct impact on the current predictions, at least for the early dates in the time series… Further calibration of the set of interest A. Or the focus of the prediction. As a side note the talk perfectly fits the One World likelihood-free seminar as it does not use the likelihood function!

“The very premise of this paper is that, in reality, any choice of predictive class is such that the truth is not contained therein, at which point there is no reason to presume that the expectation of any particular scoring rule will be maximized at the truth or, indeed, maximized by the same predictive distribution that maximizes a different (expected) score.”

This approach requires the proxy class to be close enough to the true data generating model. Or in the word of the authors to be plausible predictive models. And to produce the true distribution via the score as it is proper. Or the closest to the true model in the misspecified family. I thus wonder at a possible extension with a non-parametric version, the prior being thus on functionals rather than parameters, if I understand properly the meaning of Π(P_θ). (Could the score function be misspecified itself?!) Since the score is replaced with its empirical version, the implementation is  resorting to off-the-shelf MCMC. (I wonder for a few seconds if the approach could be seen as a pseudo-marginal MCMC but the estimation is always based on the same observed sample, hence does not directly fit the pseudo-marginal MCMC framework.)

[Notice: Next talk in the series is tomorrow, 11:30am GMT+1.]

stratified ABC [One World ABC webinar]

The third episode of the One World ABC seminar (Season 1!) was kindly delivered by Umberto Picchini on Stratified sampling and bootstrapping for ABC which I already if briefly discussed after BayesComp 2020. Which sounds like a million years ago… His introduction on the importance of estimating the likelihood using a kernel, while 600% justified wrt his talk, made the One World ABC seminar sounds almost like groundhog day!  The central argument is in the computational gain brought by simulating a single θ dependent [expensive] dataset followed by [cheaper] bootstrap replicates. Which turns de fact into bootstrapping the summary statistics.

If I understand correctly, the post-stratification approach of Art Owen (2013?, I cannot find the reference) corrects a misrepresentation of mine. Indeed, defining a partition with unknown probability weights seemed to me to annihilate the appeal of stratification, because the Bernoulli variance of the estimated probabilities brought back the same variability as the mother estimator. But with bootstrap, this requires only two simulations, one for the weights and one for the target. And further allows for a larger ABC tolerance in fine. Free lunch?!

The speaker in two weeks (21 May or Ascension Thursday!) is my friend and co-author Gael Martin from Monash University, who will speak on Focused Bayesian prediction, at quite a late time down under..!

Computing Bayes: Bayesian Computation from 1763 to the 21st Century

Last night, Gael Martin, David Frazier (from Monash U) and myself arXived a survey on the history of Bayesian computations. This project started when Gael presented a historical overview of Bayesian computation, then entitled ‘Computing Bayes: Bayesian Computation from 1763 to 2017!’, at ‘Bayes on the Beach’ (Queensland, November, 2017). She then decided to build a survey from the material she had gathered, with her usual dedication and stamina. Asking David and I to join forces and bring additional perspectives on this history. While this is a short and hence necessary incomplete history (of not everything!), it hopefully brings some different threads together in an original enough fashion (as I think there is little overlap with recent surveys I wrote). We welcome comments about aspects we missed, skipped or misrepresented, most obviously!

Nested Sampling SMC [a reply]

Here is a response from Robert Salomone following my comments of the earlier day (and pointing out I already commented the paper two years ago):

You may be interested to know that we are at the tail end of carrying out a major revision of the paper, which we hope will be done in the near future — there will be some new theory (we are in the final stages for a consistency proof of the ANS-SMC algorithm with new co-author Adam Johansen), as well as new numerics (including comparisons to Nested Sampling), and additional discussion that clarifies the overall narrative.

A few comments relating your post that may clear some things up:

• The method you describe with the auxiliary variable is actually one of three proposed algorithms. We call this one “Improved Nested Sampling” as it is the algorithm most similar to the original Nested Sampling. Two further extensions are the adaptive SMC sampler, and the fixed SMC sampler – the latter of which is provably consistent and unbiased for the model evidence (we also often see improvements over standard NS for similar computational effort when MCMC is used).
• Regarding computational effort – it is the same for Improved NS (in fact, you can obtain the standard Nested Sampling evidence estimate from the same computational run!). For the adaptive variant, the computational effort is roughly the same for ρ = e⁻¹. In the current version of the paper this is only discussed briefly (last page of p.23). However, in the revision we will include additional experiments comparing the practical performance.
• Regarding the question of “why not regular SMC”; we chose to focus more on why SMC is a good way to do Nested Sampling rather than why Nested Sampling is a good way to do SMC. Our main priority was to show there is a lot of opportunity to develop new nested sampling style algorithms by approaching it from a different angle. That said, Nested Sampling’s primary advantage over standard SMC seems to be in problems involving “phase transitions’’ such as our first example, for which temperature based methods are inherently ill-suited (and will often fail to detect so!).

research position at Monash

My friends (and coauthors) Gael Martin and David Frazier forwarded me this call for a two-year research research fellow position at Monash. Working with the team there on the most exciting topic of approximate Bayes!

The Research Fellow will conduct research associated with ARC Discovery Grant DP200101414: “Loss-Based Bayesian Prediction”. This project proposes a new paradigm for prediction. Using state-of-the-art computational methods, the project aims to produce accurate, fit for purpose predictions which, by design, reduce the loss incurred when the prediction is inaccurate. Theoretical validation of the new predictive method is an expected outcome, as is extensive application of the method to diverse empirical problems, including those based on high-dimensional and hierarchical data sets. The project will exploit recent advances in Bayesian computation, including approximate Bayesian computation and variational inference, to produce predictive distributions that are expressly designed to yield accurate predictions in a given loss measure. The Research Fellow would be expected to engage in all aspects of the research and would therefore build expertise in the methodological, theoretical and empirical aspects of this new predictive approach.

Deadline is 13 May 2020. This is definitely an offer to consider!