## truncated Gumbels

Posted in Books, Kids, pictures, Statistics with tags , , , , , , , on April 6, 2018 by xi'an

As I had to wake up pretty early on Easter morning to give my daughter a ride, while waiting I came upon this calculus question on X validated of computing the conditional expectation of a Gumbel variate, conditional on its drifted version being larger than another independent Gumbel variate with the same location-scale parameters. (Just reminding readers that a Gumbel G(0,1) variate is a double log-uniform, i.e., can be generated as X=-log(-log(U)).) And found after a few minutes (and a call to Wolfram Alpha integrator) that

$\mathbb{E}[\epsilon_1|\epsilon_1+c>\epsilon_0]=\gamma+\log(1+e^{-c})$

which is simple enough to make me wonder if there is a simpler derivation than the call to the exponential integral Ei(x) function. (And easy to check by simulation.)

Incidentally, I discovered that Emil Gumbel had applied statistical analysis to the study of four years of political murders in the Weimar Republic, demonstrating the huge bias of the local justice towards right-wing murders. When he signed the urgent call [for the union of the socialist and communist parties] against fascism in 1932, he got expelled from his professor position in Heidelberg and emigrated to France, which he had to leave again for the USA on the Nazi invasion in 1940. Where he became a professor at Columbia.

## a vignette on Metropolis

Posted in Books, Kids, R, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , on April 13, 2015 by xi'an

Over the past week, I wrote a short introduction to the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm, mostly in the style of our Introduction to Monte Carlo with R book, that is, with very little theory and worked-out illustrations on simple examples. (And partly over the Atlantic on my flight to New York and Columbia.) This vignette is intended for the Wiley StatsRef: Statistics Reference Online Series, modulo possible revision. Again, nothing novel therein, except for new examples.

## back from New York

Posted in Kids, pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , on April 5, 2015 by xi'an

## New York skyline

Posted in Kids, pictures, Travel, University life with tags , , , on April 4, 2015 by xi'an

## by the Hudson river

Posted in pictures, Running, Travel, University life with tags , , on March 31, 2015 by xi'an

## off to New York

Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , on March 29, 2015 by xi'an

I am off to New York City for two days, giving a seminar at Columbia tomorrow and visiting Andrew Gelman there. My talk will be about testing as mixture estimation, with slides similar to the Nice ones below if slightly upgraded and augmented during the flight to JFK. Looking at the past seminar speakers, I noticed we were three speakers from Paris in the last fortnight, with Ismael Castillo and Paul Doukhan (in the Applied Probability seminar) preceding me. Is there a significant bias there?!

## ABC of simulation estimation with auxiliary statistics

Posted in Statistics, University life with tags , , , , on March 10, 2015 by xi'an

“In the ABC literature, an estimator that uses a general kernel is known as a noisy ABC estimator.”

Another arXival relating M-estimation econometrics techniques with ABC. Written by Jean-Jacques Forneron and Serena Ng from the Department of Economics at Columbia University, the paper tries to draw links between indirect inference and ABC, following the tracks of Drovandi and Pettitt [not quoted there] and proposes a reverse ABC sampler by

1. given a randomness realisation, ε, creating a one-to-one transform of the parameter θ that corresponds to a realisation of a summary statistics;
2. determine the value of the parameter θ that minimises the distance between this summary statistics and the observed summary statistics;
3. weight the above value of the parameter θ by π(θ) J(θ) where J is the Jacobian of the one-to-one transform.

I have difficulties to see why this sequence produces a weighted sample associated with the posterior. Unless perhaps when the minimum of the distance is zero, in which case this amounts to some inversion of the summary statistic (function). And even then, the role of the random bit  ε is unclear. Since there is no rejection. The inversion of the summary statistics seems hard to promote in practice since the transform of the parameter θ into a (random) summary is most likely highly complex.

“The posterior mean of θ constructed from the reverse sampler is the same as the posterior mean of θ computed under the original ABC sampler.”

The authors also state (p.16) that the estimators derived by their reverse method are the same as the original ABC approach but this only happens to hold asymptotically in the sample size. And I am not even sure of this weaker statement as the tolerance does not seem to play a role then. And also because the authors later oppose ABC to their reverse sampler as the latter produces iid draws from the posterior (p.25).

“The prior can be potentially used to further reduce bias, which is a feature of the ABC.”

As an aside, while the paper reviews extensively the literature on minimum distance estimators (called M-estimators in the statistics literature) and on ABC, the first quote is missing the meaning of noisy ABC, which consists in a randomised version of ABC where the observed summary statistic is randomised at the same level as the simulated statistics. And the last quote does not sound right either, as it should be seen as a feature of the Bayesian approach rather than of the ABC algorithm. The paper also attributes the paternity of ABC to Don Rubin’s 1984 paper, “who suggested that computational methods can be used to estimate the posterior distribution of interest even when a model is analytically intractable” (pp.7-8). This is incorrect in that Rubin uses ABC to explain the nature of the Bayesian reasoning, but does not in the least address computational issues.