In continuation of my earlier post on Bayesian GANs, which resort to strongly incompatible conditionals, I read a 2015 paper of Chen and Ip that I had missed. (Published in the Journal of Statistical Computation and Simulation which I first confused with JCGS and which I do not know at all. Actually, when looking at its editorial board, I recognised only one name.) But the study therein is quite disappointing and not helping as it considers Markov chains on finite state spaces, meaning that the transition distributions are matrices, meaning also that convergence is ensured if these matrices have no null probability term. And while the paper is motivated by realistic situations where incompatible conditionals can reasonably appear, the paper only produces illustrations on two and three states Markov chains. Not that helpful, in the end… The game is still afoot!
Archive for Bayesian GANs
Gibbs for incompatible kids
Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags Bayesian GANs, convergence of Gibbs samplers, GANs, Gibbs for Kids, Gibbs sampling, irreducibility, JCGS, Markov chains, MCMC algorithms, Monte Carlo Statistical Methods, stationarity on September 27, 2018 by xi'anBayesian GANs [#2]
Posted in Books, pictures, R, Statistics with tags ABC in Edinburgh, Bayesian GANs, compatible conditional distributions, Edinburgh, GANs, generative adversarial networks, ISBA 2018, joint posterior, MCMC convergence, Metropolis-within-Gibbs algorithm, Monte Carlo Statistical Methods, normal model, University of Edinburgh on June 27, 2018 by xi'an
As an illustration of the lack of convergence of the Gibbs sampler applied to the two “conditionals” defined in the Bayesian GANs paper discussed yesterday, I took the simplest possible example of a Normal mean generative model (one parameter) with a logistic discriminator (one parameter) and implemented the scheme (during an ISBA 2018 session). With flat priors on both parameters. And a Normal random walk as Metropolis-Hastings proposal. As expected, since there is no stationary distribution associated with the Markov chain, simulated chains do not exhibit a stationary pattern,
And they eventually reach an overflow error or a trapping state as the log-likelihood gets approximately to zero (red curve).
Too bad I missed the talk by Shakir Mohammed yesterday, being stuck on the Edinburgh by-pass at rush hour!, as I would have loved to hear his views about this rather essential issue…
Bayesian gan [gan style]
Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, University life with tags ABC, Bayesian GANs, Bayesian inference, Bayesian synthetic likelihood, compatible conditional distributions, convergence of Gibbs samplers, data generating process, Gangnam Style, GANs, likelihood-free methods, machine learning, Markov chains, mixtures of distributions, optimisation on June 26, 2018 by xi'an
In their paper Bayesian GANS, arXived a year ago, Saatchi and Wilson consider a Bayesian version of generative adversarial networks, putting priors on both the model and the discriminator parameters. While the prospect seems somewhat remote from genuine statistical inference, if the following statement is representative
“GANs transform white noise through a deep neural network to generate candidate samples from a data distribution. A discriminator learns, in a supervised manner, how to tune its parameters so as to correctly classify whether a given sample has come from the generator or the true data distribution. Meanwhile, the generator updates its parameters so as to fool the discriminator. As long as the generator has sufficient capacity, it can approximate the cdf inverse-cdf composition required to sample from a data distribution of interest.”
I figure the concept can also apply to a standard statistical model, where x=G(z,θ) rephrases the distributional assumption x~F(x;θ) via a white noise z. This makes resorting to a prior distribution on θ more relevant in the sense of using potential prior information on θ (although the successes of probabilistic numerics show formal priors can be used on purely numerical ground).
The “posterior distribution” that is central to the notion of Bayesian GANs is however unorthodox in that the distribution is associated with the following conditional posteriors
where D(x,θ) is the “discriminator”, that is, in GAN lingo, the probability to be allocated to the “true” data generating mechanism rather than to the one associated with G(·,θ). The generative conditional posterior (1) then aims at fooling the discriminator, i.e. favours generative parameter values that raise the probability of wrong allocation of the pseudo-data. The discriminative conditional posterior (2) is a standard Bayesian posterior based on the original sample and the generated sample. The authors then iteratively sample from these posteriors, effectively implementing a two-stage Gibbs sampler.
“By iteratively sampling from (1) and (2) at every step of an epoch one can, in the limit, obtain samples from the approximate posteriors over [both sets of parameters].”
What worries me about this approach is that just cannot work, in the sense that (1) and (2) cannot be compatible conditional (posterior) distributions. There is no joint distribution for which (1) and (2) would be the conditionals, since the pseudo-data appears in D for (1) and (1-D) in (2). This means that the convergence of a Gibbs sampler is at best to a stationary σ-finite measure. And hence that the meaning of the chain is delicate to ascertain… Am I missing any fundamental point?! [I checked the reviews on NIPS webpage and could not spot this issue being raised.]
