## approximate Bayesian inference [survey]

Posted in Statistics with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 3, 2021 by xi'an

In connection with the special issue of Entropy I mentioned a while ago, Pierre Alquier (formerly of CREST) has written an introduction to the topic of approximate Bayesian inference that is worth advertising (and freely-available as well). Its reference list is particularly relevant. (The deadline for submissions is 21 June,)

## O’Bayes 19/2

Posted in Books, pictures, Running, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 1, 2019 by xi'an

One talk on Day 2 of O’Bayes 2019 was by Ryan Martin on data dependent priors (or “priors”). Which I have already discussed in this blog. Including the notion of a Gibbs posterior about quantities that “are not always defined through a model” [which is debatable if one sees it like part of a semi-parametric model]. Gibbs posterior that is built through a pseudo-likelihood constructed from the empirical risk, which reminds me of Bissiri, Holmes and Walker. Although requiring a prior on this quantity that is  not part of a model. And is not necessarily a true posterior and not necessarily with the same concentration rate as a true posterior. Constructing a data-dependent distribution on the parameter does not necessarily mean an interesting inference and to keep up with the theme of the conference has no automated claim to [more] “objectivity”.

And after calling a prior both Beauty and The Beast!, Erlis Ruli argued about a “bias-reduction” prior where the prior is solution to a differential equation related with some cumulants, connected with an earlier work of David Firth (Warwick).  An interesting conundrum is how to create an MCMC algorithm when the prior is that intractable, with a possible help from PDMP techniques like the Zig-Zag sampler.

While Peter Orbanz’ talk was centred on a central limit theorem under group invariance, further penalised by being the last of the (sun) day, Peter did a magnificent job of presenting the result and motivating each term. It reminded me of the work Jim Bondar was doing in Ottawa in the 1980’s on Haar measures for Bayesian inference. Including the notion of amenability [a term due to von Neumann] I had not met since then. (Neither have I met Jim since the last summer I spent in Carleton.) The CLT and associated LLN are remarkable in that the average is not over observations but over shifts of the same observation under elements of a sub-group of transformations. I wondered as well at the potential connection with the Read Paper of Kong et al. in 2003 on the use of group averaging for Monte Carlo integration [connection apart from the fact that both discussants, Michael Evans and myself, are present at this conference].

## scaling the Gibbs posterior credible regions

Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , on September 11, 2015 by xi'an

“The challenge in implementation of the Gibbs posterior is that it depends on an unspecified scale (or inverse temperature) parameter.”

A new paper by Nick Syring and Ryan Martin was arXived today on the same topic as the one I discussed last January. The setting is the same as with empirical likelihood, namely that the distribution of the data is not specified, while parameters of interest are defined via moments or, more generally, a minimising a loss function. A pseudo-likelihood can then be constructed as a substitute to the likelihood, in the spirit of Bissiri et al. (2013). It is called a “Gibbs posterior” distribution in this paper. So the “Gibbs” in the title has no link with the “Gibbs” in Gibbs sampler, since inference is conducted with respect to this pseudo-posterior. Somewhat logically (!), as n grows to infinity, the pseudo- posterior concentrates upon the pseudo-true value of θ minimising the expected loss, hence asymptotically resembles to the M-estimator associated with this criterion. As I pointed out in the discussion of Bissiri et al. (2013), one major hurdle when turning a loss into a log-likelihood is that it is at best defined up to a scale factor ω. The authors choose ω so that the Gibbs posterior

$\exp\{-\omega n l_n(\theta,x) \}\pi(\theta)$

is well-calibrated. Where ln is the empirical averaged loss. So the Gibbs posterior is part of the matching prior collection. In practice the authors calibrate ω by a stochastic optimisation iterative process, with bootstrap on the side to evaluate coverage. They briefly consider empirical likelihood as an alternative, on a median regression example, where they show that their “Gibbs confidence intervals (…) are clearly the best” (p.12). Apart from the relevance of being “well-calibrated”, and the asymptotic nature of the results. and the dependence on the parameterisation via the loss function, one may also question the possibility of using this approach in large dimensional cases where all of or none of the parameters are of interest.