MCqMC 2016 [#4]

In his plenary talk this morning, Arnaud Doucet discussed the application of pseudo-marginal techniques to the latent variable models he has been investigating for many years. And its limiting behaviour towards efficiency, with the idea of introducing correlation in the estimation of the likelihood ratio. Reducing complexity from O(T²) to O(T√T). With the very surprising conclusion that the correlation must go to 1 at a precise rate to get this reduction, since perfect correlation would induce a bias. A massive piece of work, indeed!

The next session of the morning was another instance of conflicting talks and I hoped from one room to the next to listen to Hani Doss’s empirical Bayes estimation with intractable constants (where maybe SAME could be of interest), Youssef Marzouk’s transport maps for MCMC, which sounds like an attractive idea provided the construction of the map remains manageable, and Paul Russel’s adaptive importance sampling that somehow sounded connected with our population Monte Carlo approach. (With the additional step of considering transform maps.)

An interesting item of information I got from the final announcements at MCqMC 2016 just before heading to Monash, Melbourne, is that MCqMC 2018 will take place in the city of Rennes, Brittany, on July 2-6. Not only it is a nice location on its own, but it is most conveniently located in space and time to attend ISBA 2018 in Edinburgh the week after! Just moving from one Celtic city to another Celtic city. Along with other planned satellite workshops, this occurrence should make ISBA 2018 more attractive [if need be!] for participants from oversea.

MCqMC 2016 [#2]

In her plenary talk this morning, Christine Lemieux discussed connections between quasi-Monte Carlo and copulas, covering a question I have been considering for a while. Namely, when provided with a (multivariate) joint cdf F, is there a generic way to invert a vector of uniforms [or quasi-uniforms] into a simulation from F? For Archimedian copulas (as we always can get back to copulas), there is a resolution by the Marshall-Olkin representation,  but this puts a restriction on the distributions F that can be considered. The session on synthetic likelihoods [as introduced by Simon Wood in 2010] put together by Scott Sisson was completely focussed on using normal approximations for the distribution of the vector of summary statistics, rather than the standard ABC non-parametric approximation. While there is a clear (?) advantage in using a normal pseudo-likelihood, since it stabilises with much less simulations than a non-parametric version, I find it difficult to compare both approaches, as they lead to different posterior distributions. In particular, I wonder at the impact of the dimension of the summary statistics on the approximation, in the sense that it is less and less likely that the joint is normal as this dimension increases. Whether this is damaging for the resulting inference is another issue, possibly handled by a supplementary ABC step that would take the first-step estimate as summary statistic. (As a side remark, I am intrigued at everyone being so concerned with unbiasedness of methods that are approximations with no assessment of the amount of approximation!) The last session of the day was about multimodality and MCMC solutions, with talks by Hyungsuk Tak, Pierre Jacob and Babak Shababa, plus mine. Hunsuk presented the RAM algorithm I discussed earlier under the title of “love-hate” algorithm, which was a kind reference to my post! (I remain puzzled by the ability of the algorithm to jump to another mode, given that the intermediary step aims at a low or even zero probability region with an infinite mass target.) And Pierre talked about using SMC for Wang-Landau algorithms, with a twist to the classical stochastic optimisation schedule that preserves convergence. And a terrific illustration on a distribution inspired from the Golden Gate Bridge that reminded me of my recent crossing! The discussion around my folded Markov chain talk focussed on the extension of the partition to more than two sets, the difficulty being in generating automated projections, with comments about connections with computer graphic tools. (Too bad that the parallel session saw talks by Mark Huber and Rémi Bardenet that I missed! Enjoying a terrific Burmese dinner with Rémi, Pierre and other friends also meant I could not post this entry on time for the customary 00:16. Not that it matters in the least…)

AISTATS 2016 [#1]

Travelling through Seville, I arrived in Càdiz on Sunday night, along with a massive depression [weather-speaking!]. Walking through the city from the station was nonetheless pleasant as this is an town full of small streets and nice houses. If with less churches than Seville! Richard Samworth gave the first plenary talk of AISTATS 2016  with a presentation on random projections for classification. His classifier is based on an average of a large number of linear random projections of the original data where the projections are chosen as minimising the prediction error over a subset of the components. The performances of this approach seem to be consistently higher than for random forests, which makes it definitely worth investigating further. (A related R package is available.)

The following talks that day covered Bayesian optimisation and probabilistic numerics, with Javier Gonzales introducing glasses for Bayesian optimisation in order to solve its myopia (!)—by which he meant predicting the output of the optimisation over n future steps. And a first mention of the Pima Indians by Daniel Hernandez-Lobato in his talk about EP with stochastic gradient steps towards optimisation. (As well as much larger datasets.) And Mark Girolami bringing quasi-Monte Carlo into control variates. A kernel based ABC by Mijung Park, which uses kernels and maximum mean discrepancy to avoid defining summary statistics, and a version of parallel MCMC by Guillaume Basse. Plus another session on deep learning.

As usual with AISTATS conferences, the central activity of the day was the noon poster session, including speakers discussing their paper, and I had several interesting chats about MCMC related topics, with e.g. one alternative notion of ensemble MCMC [centred on estimating the normalising constant].

We awarded the notable student paper awards before the welcoming cocktail: The winners are Bo Dai, Nedelina Teneva, and Ye Wang.  And this first day ended up with a companionable evening in a most genuine tapa bar, tasting local blood sausage and local blue cheese. (If you do not mind the corrida theme!)

SADA’16

snapshot from Montréal

can we trust computer simulations?

How can one validate the outcome of a validation model? Or can we even imagine validation of this outcome? This was the starting question for the conference I attended in Hannover. Which obviously engaged me to the utmost. Relating to some past experiences like advising a student working on accelerated tests for fighter electronics. And failing to agree with him on validating a model to turn those accelerated tests within a realistic setting. Or reviewing this book on climate simulation three years ago while visiting Monash University. Since I discuss in details below most talks of the day, here is an opportunity to opt away!

Bayesian statistics from methods to models and applications

A Springer book published in conjunction with the great BAYSM 2014 conference in Wien last year has now appeared. Here is the table of contents:

• Bayesian Survival Model Based on Moment Characterization by Arbel, Julyan et al.
• A New Finite Approximation for the NGG Mixture Model: An Application to Density Estimation by Bianchini, Ilaria
• Distributed Estimation of Mixture Model by Dedecius, Kamil et al.
• Jeffreys’ Priors for Mixture Estimation by Grazian, Clara and X
• A Subordinated Stochastic Process Model by Palacios, Ana Paula et al.
• Bayesian Variable Selection for Generalized Linear Models Using the Power-Conditional-Expected-Posterior Prior by Perrakis, Konstantinos et al.
• Application of Interweaving in DLMs to an Exchange and Specialization Experiment by Simpson, Matthew
• On Bayesian Based Adaptive Confidence Sets for Linear Functionals by Szabó, Botond
• Identifying the Infectious Period Distribution for Stochastic Epidemic Models Using the Posterior Predictive Check by Alharthi, Muteb et al.
• A New Strategy for Testing Cosmology with Simulations by Killedar, Madhura et al.
• Formal and Heuristic Model Averaging Methods for Predicting the US Unemployment Rate by Kolly, Jeremy
• Bayesian Estimation of the Aortic Stiffness based on Non-invasive Computed Tomography Images by Lanzarone, Ettore et al.
• Bayesian Filtering for Thermal Conductivity Estimation Given Temperature Observations by Martín-Fernández, Laura et al.
• A Mixture Model for Filtering Firms’ Profit Rates by Scharfenaker, Ellis et al.

Enjoy!