## the last digit of e

Posted in Kids, Mountains, pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , on March 3, 2016 by xi'an

Éric Marchand from Sherbrooke, Québec [historical birthplace of MCMC, since Adrian Smith gave his first talk on his Gibbs sampler there, in June 1989], noticed my recent posts about the approximation of e by Monte Carlo methods and sent me a paper he wrote in The Mathematical Gazette of November 1995 [full MCMC era!] about original proofs on the expectation of some stopping rules being e, like the length of increasing runs. And Gnedenko’s uniform summation until exceeding one. Amazing that this simple problem generated so much investigation!!!

## twilight zone [of statistics]

Posted in Books, pictures, R, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , on February 26, 2016 by xi'an

“I have decided that mixtures, like tequila, are inherently evil and should be avoided at all costs.” L. Wasserman

Larry Wasserman once remarked that finite mixtures were like the twilight zone of statistics, thanks to the numerous idiosyncrasies associated with such models. And George Casella had similar strong reservations about mixture estimation. Avi Feller and co-authors [including Natesh Pillai] have just arXived a paper on this topic, exhibiting shocking (!) properties of the MLE! Their core example is a mixture of two normal distributions with known common variance and known weight different from 0.5, which ensures identifiability. This is a favourite example of mine that we used for instance in our book Introducing Monte Carlo methods with R. If only because we can plot the likelihood and posterior surfaces. (Warning: I wrote those notes on an earlier version of the paper, so mileage may vary in terms of accuracy!)

The “shocking” discovery in the paper is that the MLE is wrong as often as not in selecting the sign of the difference Δ between both means, with an additional accumulation point at zero. The global mode may thus be in the wrong place for small enough sample sizes. And even for larger sizes: when the difference between the means is small the likelihood is likely to be unimodal with a mode quite close to zero. (An interesting remark is that the likelihood derivative is always zero at Δ=0 when considering the special case of both means equal to -Δ and to πΔ/(1-π), respectively, which implies that the overall mean of the mixture is equal to zero. A potential connection with our reparameterisation paper, maybe?)

The alternative proposed by Avi and his co-authors is to proceed through moments, i.e., to revert to Pearson (1892). There are however difficulties with this approach, first and foremost the non-uniqueness of the moment equations used to estimate Δ. For instance, the second cumulant equation chosen by the authors is not always defined as opposed to the third cumulant equation (why not using this third cumulant then). Which does not always produce the right sign… But, in a strange twist, the authors turn those deficiencies into signals for both pathologies (wrong sign and “pile-up” at zero).

“…the grid bootstrap yields an exact p-value for any valid test statistic.”

The most importance issue in this framework being in estimating the parameters, the authors opt for an approach based on tests, which is definitely surprising given the well-known deficiencies of standard tests in mixtures. The test chosen here is a Wald test with a statistic equal to the χ² version of the first cumulant differences. I am surprised that the χ² approximation works in such an unfriendly setting. And I do not understand how the grid is used, unless a certain degree of approximation is accepted, which takes us back to the “dark ages” of imposing a minimal distance Δ to achieve consistency, as in Ghosh and Sen (1985).

“..our concern about sign error is trivial in the Bayesian setting: the global mode is simply a poor summary of a multi-modal posterior. More broadly, the weak identification issues we highlight in this paper are not necessarily relevant to a strict Bayesian.”

A priori, I do not think pathologies of the MLE always transfer to Bayes estimators, unless one uses the MAP as an [poor] estimator. But using the MAP is not necessary since posterior means are meaningful in this identified setting, where label switching should not occur. However, running the same experiments with a Gaussian prior on both means and using the posterior mean as my estimator, I did obtain the same pathology of Bayes estimates [also produced in the supplementary material] not concentrating on the true value of the difference, but putting weight on the opposite value and at zero. Using a less standard prior inspired by David Rossell’s talk on non-local priors two weeks ago, which avoids a neighbourhood of zero, I did not get a much different picture as illustrated below:

Overall, I remain somewhat uncertain as to what to conclude from this pathological behaviour. When both means are close enough, the sign of the difference is often estimated wrongly. But that could simply mean that the means are not significantly different, for that sample size…

## more of the same!

Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , on December 10, 2015 by xi'an

Daniel Seita, Haoyu Chen, and John Canny arXived last week a paper entitled “Fast parallel SAME Gibbs sampling on general discrete Bayesian networks“.  The distributions of the observables are defined by full conditional probability tables on the nodes of a graphical model. The distributions on the latent or missing nodes of the network are multinomial, with Dirichlet priors. To derive the MAP in such models, although this goal is not explicitly stated in the paper till the second page, the authors refer to the recent paper by Zhao et al. (2015), discussed on the ‘Og just as recently, which applies our SAME methodology. Since the paper is mostly computational (and submitted to ICLR 2016, which takes place juuust before AISTATS 2016), I do not have much to comment about it. Except to notice that the authors mention our paper as “Technical report, Statistics and Computing, 2002”. I am not sure the editor of Statistics and Computing will appreciate! The proper reference is in Statistics and Computing, 12:77-84, 2002.

“We argue that SAME is beneficial for Gibbs sampling because it helps to reduce excess variance.”

Still, I am a wee bit surprised at both the above statement and at the comparison with a JAGS implementation. Because SAME augments the number of latent vectors as the number of iterations increases, so should be slower by a mere curse of dimension,, slower than a regular Gibbs with a single latent vector. And because I do not get either the connection with JAGS: SAME could be programmed in JAGS, couldn’t it? If the authors means a regular Gibbs sampler with no latent vector augmentation, the comparison makes little sense as one algorithm aims at the MAP (with a modest five replicas), while the other encompasses the complete posterior distribution. But this sounds unlikely when considering that the larger the number m of replicas the better their alternative to JAGS. It would thus be interesting to understand what the authors mean by JAGS in this setup!

## MCMskv, Lenzerheide, 4-7 Jan., 2016 [breaking news #6]

Posted in Kids, Mountains, pictures, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , on December 2, 2015 by xi'an

As indicated in an earlier MCMskv news, the scientific committee kept a session open for Breaking news! proposals, in conjunction with poster submissions. We received 21 proposals and managed to squeeze 12 fifteen minute presentations in an already tight program. (I advise all participants to take a relaxing New Year break and to load in vitamins and such in preparation for a 24/7 or rather 24/3 relentless and X’citing conference!) Here are the selected presentations, with (some links to my posts on the related papers and) abstracts available on the conference website. Note to all participants that there are still a few days left for submitting posters!

Luke Bornn

Jon Cockayne

Gersende Fort

Michael Gutmann

James Johndrow

Jean-Michel Marin

Murray Pollock

Maxim Rabinovich

Rebecca Steorts

Alexander Terenin

Yazhen Wang

Giacomo Zanella

## data augmentation with divergence

Posted in Books, Kids, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , on November 18, 2015 by xi'an

Another (!) Cross Validated question that shed some light on the difficulties of explaining the convergence of MCMC algorithms. Or in understanding conditioning and hierarchical models. The author wanted to know why a data augmentation of his did not converge: In a simplified setting, given an observation y that he wrote as y=h(x,θ), he had built a Gibbs sampler by reconstructing x=g(y,θ) and simulating θ given x: at each iteration t,

1. compute xt=g(y,θt-1)
2. simulate θt~π(θ|xt)

and he attributed the lack of convergence to a possible difficulty with the Jacobian. My own interpretation of the issue was rather that condition on the unobserved x was not the same as conditioning on the observed y and hence that y was missing from step 2. And that the simulation of x is useless. Unless one uses it in an augmented scheme à la Xiao-Li… Nonetheless, I like the problem, if only because my very first reaction was to draw a hierarchical dependence graph and to conclude this should be correct, before checking on a toy example that it was not!

## likelihood-free inference in high-dimensional models

Posted in Books, R, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , on September 1, 2015 by xi'an

“…for a general linear model (GLM), a single linear function is a sufficient statistic for each associated parameter…”

The recently arXived paper “Likelihood-free inference in high-dimensional models“, by Kousathanas et al. (July 2015), proposes an ABC resolution of the dimensionality curse [when the dimension of the parameter and of the corresponding summary statistics] by turning Gibbs-like and by using a component-by-component ABC-MCMC update that allows for low dimensional statistics. In the (rare) event there exists a conditional sufficient statistic for each component of the parameter vector, the approach is just as justified as when using a generic ABC-Gibbs method based on the whole data. Otherwise, that is, when using a non-sufficient estimator of the corresponding component (as, e.g., in a generalised [not general!] linear model), the approach is less coherent as there is no joint target associated with the Gibbs moves. One may therefore wonder at the convergence properties of the resulting algorithm. The only safe case [in dimension 2] is when one of the restricted conditionals does not depend on the other parameter. Note also that each Gibbs step a priori requires the simulation of a new pseudo-dataset, which may be a major imposition on computing time. And that setting the tolerance for each parameter is a delicate calibration issue because in principle the tolerance should depend on the other component values. Continue reading

## Moment conditions and Bayesian nonparametrics

Posted in R, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , on August 6, 2015 by xi'an

Luke Bornn, Neil Shephard, and Reza Solgi (all from Harvard) have arXived a pretty interesting paper on simulating targets on a zero measure set. Although it is not initially presented this way, but rather in non-parametric terms as moment conditions

$\mathbb{E}_\theta[g(X,\beta)]=0$

where θ is the parameter of the sampling distribution, constrained by the value of β. (Which also contains quantile regression.) The very problem of simulating under a hard constraint has been bugging me for years and it is hence very exciting to see them come up with a proposal towards solving this difficulty! Even though it is restricted here to observations with a finite support (hence allowing for the use of a parametric Dirichlet prior). One interesting extension (Section 3.6) processed in the paper is the case when the support is unknown, but finite, with some points in the support being unobserved. Maybe connecting with non-parametrics if a prior is added on the number of unobserved points.

The setting of constricting θ via a parameterised moment condition relates to moment defined econometrics models, in a similar spirit to Gallant’s paper I recently discussed, but equally to empirical likelihood, which would then benefit from a fully Bayesian treatment thanks to the approach advocated by the authors.

Despite the zero-measure difficulty, or more exactly the non-linear manifold structure of the parameter space, for instance

β = log {θ/(1-θ)}

the authors manage to define a “projected” [my words] measure on the set of admissible pairs (β,θ). In a sense this is related with the choice of a certain metric, but the so-called Hausdorff reference measure allows for an automated definition of the original prior. It took me a (wee) while to spot (p.7) that the starting point was not a (unconstrained) prior on that (unconstrained) pair (β,θ) but directly on the manifold

$\mathbb{E}_\theta[g(X,\beta)]=0.$

Which makes its construction a difficulty. Even though, as noted in Section 4, all that we need is a prior over θ since the Hausdorff-Jacobian identity defines the “joint”, in a sort of backward way. (This is a wee bit confusing in that β being a transform of θ, all we need is a prior over θ, but we nonetheless end up with a different density on the joint distribution on the pair (β,θ). Any connection with incompatible priors merged together into a consensus prior?) Another question extending the scope of the paper would be to define Jeffreys’ or reference priors in this manifold sense.

The authors also discuss (Section 4.3) the problem I originally thought they were processing, namely starting from an unconstrained pair (β,θ) and it corresponding prior. The projected prior can then be defined based on a version of the original density on the constrained space, but it is definitely arbitrary. In that sense the paper does not address the general problem.

“…traditional simulation algorithms will fail because the prior and the posterior of the model are supported on a zero Lebesgue measure set…” (p.10)

I somewhat resist this presentation through the measure zero set: once the prior is defined on a manifold, the fact that it is a measure zero set in a larger space is moot. Provided one can simulate a proposal over that manifold, e.g., a random walk, absolutely continuous wrt the same dominating measure, and compute or estimate a Metropolis-Hastings ratio of densities against a common measure, one can formally run MCMC on manifolds as well as regular Euclidean spaces. A first and theoretically straightforward (?) solution is to solve the constraint

$\mathbb{E}_\theta[g(X,\beta)]=0$

in β=β(θ). Then the joint prior p(β,θ) can be projected by the Hausdorff projection into p(θ). For instance, in the case of the above logit transform, the projected density is

p(θ)=p(β,θ) {1+1/θ²(1-θ)²}½

In practice, the inversion may be too costly and Bornn et al. directly simulate the pair (β,θ) within the manifold capitalising on the fact that the constraint is linear in θ given β. Indeed, in this setting, β is unconstrained and θ can be simulated from a proposal restricted to the hyperplane. Gibbs-like.