inferring the number of components [remotely]

evidence estimation in finite and infinite mixture models

Adrien Hairault (PhD student at Dauphine), Judith and I just arXived a new paper on evidence estimation for mixtures. This may sound like a well-trodden path that I have repeatedly explored in the past, but methinks that estimating the model evidence doth remain a notoriously difficult task for large sample or many component finite mixtures and even more for “infinite” mixture models corresponding to a Dirichlet process. When considering different Monte Carlo techniques advocated in the past, like Chib’s (1995) method, SMC, or bridge sampling, they exhibit a range of performances, in terms of computing time… One novel (?) approach in the paper is to write Chib’s (1995) identity for partitions rather than parameters as (a) it bypasses the label switching issue (as we already noted in Hurn et al., 2000), another one is to exploit  Geyer (1991-1994) reverse logistic regression technique in the more challenging Dirichlet mixture setting, and yet another one a sequential importance sampling solution à la  Kong et al. (1994), as also noticed by Carvalho et al. (2010). [We did not cover nested sampling as it quickly becomes onerous.]

Applications are numerous. In particular, testing for the number of components in a finite mixture model or against the fit of a finite mixture model for a given dataset has long been and still is an issue of much interest and diverging opinions, albeit yet missing a fully satisfactory resolution. Using a Bayes factor to find the right number of components K in a finite mixture model is known to provide a consistent procedure. We furthermore establish there the consistence of the Bayes factor when comparing a parametric family of finite mixtures against the nonparametric ‘strongly identifiable’ Dirichlet Process Mixture (DPM) model.

from here to infinity

“Introducing a sparsity prior avoids overfitting the number of clusters not only for finite mixtures, but also (somewhat unexpectedly) for Dirichlet process mixtures which are known to overfit the number of clusters.”

On my way back from Clermont-Ferrand, in an old train that reminded me of my previous ride on that line that took place in… 1975!, I read a fairly interesting paper published in Advances in Data Analysis and Classification by [my Viennese friends] Sylvia Früwirth-Schnatter and Gertrud Malsiner-Walli, where they describe how sparse finite mixtures and Dirichlet process mixtures can achieve similar results when clustering a given dataset. Provided the hyperparameters in both approaches are calibrated accordingly. In both cases these hyperparameters (scale of the Dirichlet process mixture versus scale of the Dirichlet prior on the weights) are endowed with Gamma priors, both depending on the number of components in the finite mixture. Another interesting feature of the paper is to witness how close the related MCMC algorithms are when exploiting the stick-breaking representation of the Dirichlet process mixture. With a resolution of the label switching difficulties via a point process representation and k-mean clustering in the parameter space. [The title of the paper is inspired from Ian Stewart’s book.]

Big Bayes goes South

At the Big [Data] Bayes conference this week [which I found quite exciting despite a few last minute cancellations by speakers] there were a lot of clustering talks including the ones by Amy Herring (Duke), using a notion of centering that should soon appear on arXiv. By Peter Müller (UT, Austin) towards handling large datasets. Based on a predictive recursion that takes one value at a time, unsurprisingly similar to the update of Dirichlet process mixtures. (Inspired by a 1998 paper by Michael Newton and co-authors.) The recursion doubles in size at each observation, requiring culling of negligible components. Order matters? Links with Malsiner-Walli et al. (2017) mixtures of mixtures. Also talks by Antonio Lijoi and Igor Pruenster (Boconni Milano) on completely random measures that are used in creating clusters. And by Sylvia Frühwirth-Schnatter (WU Wien) on creating clusters for the Austrian labor market of the impact of company closure. And by Gregor Kastner (WU Wien) on multivariate factor stochastic models, with a video of a large covariance matrix evolving over time and catching economic crises. And by David Dunson (Duke) on distance clustering. Reflecting like myself on the definitely ill-defined nature of the [clustering] object. As the sample size increases, spurious clusters appear. (Which reminded me of a disagreement I had had with David McKay at an ICMS conference on mixtures twenty years ago.) Making me realise I missed the recent JASA paper by Miller and Dunson on that perspective.

Some further snapshots (with short comments visible by hovering on the picture) of a very high quality meeting [says one of the organisers!]. Following suggestions from several participants, it would be great to hold another meeting at CIRM in a near future.