Yesterday, Giulia Carallo arXived the paper on generalised Poisson difference autoregressive processes that is a component of her Ph.D. thesis at Ca’ Foscari Universita di Venezia and to which I contributed while visiting Venezia last Spring. The stochastic process under study is integer valued as a difference of two generalised Poisson variates, made dependent by an INGARCH process that expresses the mean as a regression over past values of the process and past means. Which can be easily simulated as a difference of (correlated) Poisson variates. These two variates can in their turn be (re)defined through a thinning operator that I find most compelling, namely as a sum of Poisson variates with a number of terms being a (quasi-) Binomial variate depending on the previous value. This representation proves useful in establishing stationarity conditions on the process. Beyond establishing various properties of the process, the paper also examines how to conduct Bayesian inference in this context, with specialised Gibbs samplers in action. And comparing models on real datasets via Geyer‘s (1994) logistic approximation to Bayes factors.
Archive for Bayes factors
generalised Poisson difference autoregressive processes
Posted in pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags autoregressive model, Bayes factors, Ca' Foscari University, Charlie Geyer, PhD thesis, Poisson distribution, stationarity, thinning, Venezia on February 14, 2020 by xi'anSiem Reap conference
Posted in Kids, pictures, Travel, University life with tags Arkhangelsk, Bayes factors, Bayesian model choice, Bayesian model comparison, Cambodia, conference, CREST, Data Science and Finance conference, geometric ergodicity, group picture, Hyvärinen score, India, krama, Langevin MCMC algorithm, NGO, Pakistan, Sala Baï school, Siem Reap, Wasserstein distance on March 8, 2019 by xi'anAs I returned from the conference in Siem Reap. on a flight avoiding India and Pakistan and their [brittle and bristling!] boundary on the way back, instead flying far far north, near Arkhangelsk (but with nothing to show for it, as the flight back was fully in the dark), I reflected how enjoyable this conference had been, within a highly friendly atmosphere, meeting again with many old friends (some met prior to the creation of CREST) and new ones, a pleasure not hindered by the fabulous location near Angkor of course. (The above picture is the “last hour” group picture, missing a major part of the participants, already gone!)
Among the many talks, Stéphane Shao gave a great presentation on a paper [to appear in JASA] jointly written with Pierre Jacob, Jie Ding, and Vahid Tarokh on the Hyvärinen score and its use for Bayesian model choice, with a highly intuitive representation of this divergence function (which I first met in Padua when Phil Dawid gave a talk on this approach to Bayesian model comparison). Which is based on the use of a divergence function based on the squared error difference between the gradients of the true log-score and of the model log-score functions. Providing an alternative to the Bayes factor that can be shown to be consistent, even for some non-iid data, with some gains in the experiments represented by the above graph.
Arnak Dalalyan (CREST) presented a paper written with Lionel Riou-Durand on the convergence of non-Metropolised Langevin Monte Carlo methods, with a new discretization which leads to a substantial improvement of the upper bound on the sampling error rate measured in Wasserstein distance. Moving from p/ε to √p/√ε in the requested number of steps when p is the dimension and ε the target precision, for smooth and strongly log-concave targets.
This post gives me the opportunity to advertise for the NGO Sala Baï hostelry school, which the whole conference visited for lunch and which trains youths from underprivileged backgrounds towards jobs in hostelery, supported by donations, companies (like Krama Krama), or visiting the Sala Baï restaurant and/or hotel while in Siem Reap.
leave Bayes factors where they once belonged
Posted in Statistics with tags Bayes factors, Bayesian Analysis, Bayesian decision theory, cross validated, prior comparison, prior predictive, prior selection, The Bayesian Choice, The Beatles, using the data twice, xkcd on February 19, 2019 by xi'anIn the past weeks I have received and read several papers (and X validated entries)where the Bayes factor is used to compare priors. Which does not look right to me, not on the basis of my general dislike of Bayes factors!, but simply because this seems to clash with the (my?) concept of Bayesian model choice and also because data should not play a role in that situation, from being used to select a prior, hence at least twice to run the inference, to resort to a single parameter value (namely the one behind the data) to decide between two distributions, to having no asymptotic justification, to eventually favouring the prior concentrated on the maximum likelihood estimator. And more. But I fear that this reticence to test for prior adequacy also extends to the prior predictive, or Box’s p-value, namely the probability under this prior predictive to observe something “more extreme” than the current observation, to quote from David Spiegelhalter.