## convergence of MCMC

Posted in Statistics with tags , , , , , , , , , on June 16, 2017 by xi'an

Michael Betancourt just posted on arXiv an historical  review piece on the convergence of MCMC, with a physical perspective.

“The success of these of Markov chain Monte Carlo, however, contributed to its own demise.”

The discourse proceeds through augmented [reality!] versions of MCMC algorithms taking advantage of the shape and nature of the target distribution, like Langevin diffusions [which cannot be simulated directly and exactly at the same time] in statistics and molecular dynamics in physics. (Which reminded me of the two parallel threads at the ICMS workshop we had a few years ago.) Merging into hybrid Monte Carlo, morphing into Hamiltonian Monte Carlo under the quills of Radford Neal and David MacKay in the 1990’s. It is a short entry (and so is this post), with some background already well-known to the community, but it nonetheless provides a perspective and references rarely mentioned in statistics.

## accelerating MCMC

Posted in Statistics with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 29, 2017 by xi'an

I have recently [well, not so recently!] been asked to write a review paper on ways of accelerating MCMC algorithms for the [review] journal WIREs Computational Statistics and would welcome all suggestions towards the goal of accelerating MCMC algorithms. Besides [and including more on]

• coupling strategies using different kernels and switching between them;
• tempering strategies using flatter or lower dimensional targets as intermediary steps, e.g., à la Neal;
• sequential Monte Carlo with particle systems targeting again flatter or lower dimensional targets and adapting proposals to this effect;
• Hamiltonian MCMC, again with connections to Radford (and more generally ways of avoiding rejections);
• adaptive MCMC, obviously;
• Rao-Blackwellisation, just as obviously (in the sense that increasing the precision in the resulting estimates means less simulations).

## HMC sampling in Bayesian empirical likelihood computation

Posted in Statistics with tags , , , , , , , on March 31, 2017 by xi'an

While working on the Series B’log the other day I noticed this paper by Chauduri et al. on Hamiltonian Monte Carlo and empirical likelihood: how exciting!!! Here is the abstract of the paper:

We consider Bayesian empirical likelihood estimation and develop an efficient Hamiltonian Monte Car lo method for sampling from the posterior distribution of the parameters of interest.The method proposed uses hitherto unknown properties of the gradient of the underlying log-empirical-likelihood function. We use results from convex analysis to show that these properties hold under minimal assumptions on the parameter space, prior density and the functions used in the estimating equations determining the empirical likelihood. Our method employs a finite number of estimating equations and observations but produces valid semi-parametric inference for a large class of statistical models including mixed effects models, generalized linear models and hierarchical Bayes models. We overcome major challenges posed by complex, non-convex boundaries of the support routinely observed for empirical likelihood which prevent efficient implementation of traditional Markov chain Monte Car lo methods like random-walk Metropolis–Hastings sampling etc. with or without parallel tempering. A simulation study confirms that our method converges quickly and draws samples from the posterior support efficiently. We further illustrate its utility through an analysis of a discrete data set in small area estimation.

[The comment is reposted from Series B’log, where I wrote it first.]

It is of particular interest for me [disclaimer: I was not involved in the review of this paper!] as we worked on ABC thru empirical likelihood, which is about the reverse of the current paper in terms of motivation: when faced with a complex model, we substitute an empirical likelihood version for the real thing, run simulations from the prior distribution and use the empirical likelihood as a proxy. With possible intricacies when the data is not iid (an issue we also met with Wasserstein distances.) In this paper the authors instead consider working on an empirical likelihood as their starting point and derive an HMC algorithm to do so. The idea is striking in that, by nature, an empirical likelihood is not a very smooth object and hence does not seem open to producing gradients and Hessians. As illustrated by Figure 1 in the paper . Which is so spiky at places that one may wonder at the representativity of such graphs.

I have always had a persistent worry about the ultimate validity of treating the empirical likelihood as a genuine likelihood, from the fact that it is the result of an optimisation problem to the issue that the approximate empirical distribution has a finite (data-dependent) support, hence is completely orthogonal to the true distribution. And to the one that the likelihood function is zero outside the convex hull of the defining equations…(For one thing, this empirical likelihood is always bounded by one but this may be irrelevant after all!)

The computational difficulty in handling the empirical likelihood starts with its support. Eliminating values of the parameter for which this empirical likelihood is zero amounts to checking whether zero belongs to the above convex hull. A hard (NP hard?) problem. (Although I do not understand why the authors dismiss the token observations of Owen and others. The argument that Bayesian analysis does more than maximising a likelihood seems to confuse the empirical likelihood as a product of a maximisation step with the empirical likelihood as a function of the parameter that can be used as any other function.)

In the simple regression example (pp.297-299), I find the choice of the moment constraints puzzling, in that they address the mean of the white noise (zero) and the covariance with the regressors (zero too). Puzzling because my definition of the regression model is conditional on the regressors and hence does not imply anything on their distribution. In a sense this is another model. But I also note that the approach focus on the distribution of the reconstituted white noises, as we did in the PNAS paper. (The three examples processed in the paper are all simple and could be processed by regular MCMC, thus making the preliminary step of calling for an empirical likelihood somewhat artificial unless I missed the motivation. The paper also does not seem to discuss the impact of the choice of the moment constraints or the computing constraints involved by a function that is itself the result of a maximisation problem.)

A significant part of the paper is dedicated to the optimisation problem and the exclusion of the points on the boundary. Which sounds like a non-problem in continuous settings. However, this appears to be of importance for running an HMC as it cannot evade the support (without token observations). On principle, HMC should not leave this support since the gradient diverges at the boundary, but in practice the leapfrog approximation may lead the path outside. I would have (naïvely?) suggested to reject moves when this happens and start again but the authors consider that proper choices of the calibration factors of HMC can avoid this problem. Which seems to induce a practical issue by turning the algorithm into an adaptive version.

As a last point, I would have enjoyed seeing a comparison of the performances against our (A)BCel version, which would have been straightforward to implement in the simple examples handled by the paper. (This could be a neat undergraduate project for next year!)

## asymptotically exact inference in likelihood-free models

Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics with tags , , , , , , , on November 29, 2016 by xi'an

“We use the intuition that inference corresponds to integrating a density across the manifold corresponding to the set of inputs consistent with the observed outputs.”

Following my earlier post on that paper by Matt Graham and Amos Storkey (University of Edinburgh), I now read through it. The beginning is somewhat unsettling, albeit mildly!, as it starts by mentioning notions like variational auto-encoders, generative adversial nets, and simulator models, by which they mean generative models represented by a (differentiable) function g that essentially turn basic variates with density p into the variates of interest (with intractable density). A setting similar to Meeds’ and Welling’s optimisation Monte Carlo. Another proximity pointed out in the paper is Meeds et al.’s Hamiltonian ABC.

“…the probability of generating simulated data exactly matching the observed data is zero.”

The section on the standard ABC algorithms mentions the fact that ABC MCMC can be (re-)interpreted as a pseudo-marginal MCMC, albeit one targeting the ABC posterior instead of the original posterior. The starting point of the paper is the above quote, which echoes a conversation I had with Gabriel Stolz a few weeks ago, when he presented me his free energy method and when I could not see how to connect it with ABC, because having an exact match seemed to cancel the appeal of ABC, all parameter simulations then producing an exact match under the right constraint. However, the paper maintains this can be done, by looking at the joint distribution of the parameters, latent variables, and observables. Under the implicit restriction imposed by keeping the observables constant. Which defines a manifold. The mathematical validation is achieved by designing the density over this manifold, which looks like

$p(u)\left|\frac{\partial g^0}{\partial u}\frac{\partial g^0}{\partial u}^\text{T}\right|^{-\textonehalf}$

if the constraint can be rewritten as g⁰(u)=0. (This actually follows from a 2013 paper by Diaconis, Holmes, and Shahshahani.) In the paper, the simulation is conducted by Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC), the leapfrog steps consisting of an unconstrained move followed by a projection onto the manifold. This however sounds somewhat intense in that it involves a quasi-Newton resolution at each step. I also find it surprising that this projection step does not jeopardise the stationary distribution of the process, as the argument found therein about the approximation of the approximation is not particularly deep. But the main thing that remains unclear to me after reading the paper is how the constraint that the pseudo-data be equal to the observable data can be turned into a closed form condition like g⁰(u)=0. As mentioned above, the authors assume a generative model based on uniform (or other simple) random inputs but this representation seems impossible to achieve in reasonably complex settings.

## common derivation for Metropolis–Hastings and other MCMC algorithms

Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 25, 2016 by xi'an

Khoa Tran and Robert Kohn from UNSW just arXived a paper on a comprehensive derivation of a large range of MCMC algorithms, beyond Metropolis-Hastings. The idea is to decompose the MCMC move into

1. a random completion of the current value θ into V;
2. a deterministic move T from (θ,V) to (ξ,W), where only ξ matters.

If this sounds like a new version of Peter Green’s completion at the core of his 1995 RJMCMC algorithm, it is because it is indeed essentially the same notion. The resort to this completion allows for a standard form of the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm, which leads to the correct stationary distribution if T is self-inverse. This representation covers Metropolis-Hastings algorithms, Gibbs sampling, Metropolis-within-Gibbs and auxiliary variables methods, slice sampling, recursive proposals, directional sampling, Langevin and Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, NUTS sampling, pseudo-marginal Metropolis-Hastings algorithms, and pseudo-marginal Hamiltonian  Monte Carlo, as discussed by the authors. Given this representation of the Markov chain through a random transform, I wonder if Peter Glynn’s trick mentioned in the previous post on retrospective Monte Carlo applies in this generic setting (as it could considerably improve convergence…)

## inefficiency of data augmentation for large samples

Posted in Books, pictures, Running, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , on May 31, 2016 by xi'an

On Monday, James Johndrow, Aaron Smith, Natesh Pillai, and David Dunson arXived a paper on the diminishing benefits of using data augmentation for large and highly imbalanced categorical data. They reconsider the data augmentation scheme of Tanner and Wong (1987), surprisingly not mentioned, used in the first occurrences of the Gibbs sampler like Albert and Chib’s (1993) or our mixture estimation paper with Jean Diebolt (1990). The central difficulty with data augmentation is that the distribution to be simulated operates on a space that is of order O(n), even when the original distribution covers a single parameter. As illustrated by the coalescent in population genetics (and the subsequent intrusion of the ABC methodology), there are well-known cases when the completion is near to impossible and clearly inefficient (as again illustrated by the failure of importance sampling strategies on the coalescent). The paper provides spectral gaps for the logistic and probit regression completions, which are of order a power of log(n) divided by √n, when all observations are equal to one. In a somewhat related paper with Jim Hobert and Vivek Roy, we studied the spectral gap for mixtures with a small number of observations: I wonder at the existence of a similar result in this setting, when all observations stem from one component of the mixture, when all observations are one. The result in this paper is theoretically appealing, the more because the posteriors associated with such models are highly regular and very close to Gaussian (and hence not that challenging as argued by Chopin and Ridgway). And because the data augmentation algorithm is uniformly ergodic in this setting (as we established with Jean Diebolt  and later explored with Richard Tweedie). As demonstrated in the  experiment produced in the paper, when comparing with HMC and Metropolis-Hastings (same computing times?), which produce much higher effective sample sizes.

## slice sampling revisited

Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics with tags , , , , , , , , on April 15, 2016 by xi'an

Thanks to an X validated question, I re-read Radford Neal’s 2003 Slice sampling paper. Which is an Annals of Statistics discussion paper, and rightly so. While I was involved in the editorial processing of this massive paper (!), I had only vague memories left about it. Slice sampling has this appealing feature of being the equivalent of random walk Metropolis-Hastings for Gibbs sampling, without the drawback of setting a scale for the moves.

“These slice sampling methods can adaptively change the scale of changes made, which makes them easier to tune than Metropolis methods and also avoids problems that arise when the appropriate scale of changes varies over the distribution  (…) Slice sampling methods that improve sampling by suppressing random walks can also be constructed.” (p.706)

One major theme in the paper is fighting random walk behaviour, of which Radford is a strong proponent. Even at the present time, I am a bit surprised by this feature as component-wise slice sampling is exhibiting clear features of a random walk, exploring the subgraph of the target by random vertical and horizontal moves. Hence facing the potential drawback of backtracking to previously visited places.

“A Markov chain consisting solely of overrelaxed updates might not be ergodic.” (p.729)

Overrelaxation is presented as a mean to avoid the random walk behaviour by removing rejections. The proposal is actually deterministic projecting the current value to the “other side” of the approximate slice. If it stays within the slice it is accepted. This “reflection principle” [in that it takes the symmetric wrt the centre of the slice] is also connected with antithetic sampling in that it induces rather negative correlation between the successive simulations. The last methodological section covers reflective slice sampling, which appears as a slice version of Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC). Given the difficulty in implementing exact HMC (reflected in the later literature), it is no wonder that Radford proposes an approximation scheme that is valid if somewhat involved.

“We can show invariance of this distribution by showing (…) detailed balance, which for a uniform distribution reduces to showing that the probability density for x¹ to be selected as the next state, given that the current state is x0, is the same as the probability density for x⁰ to be the next state, given that x¹ is the current state, for any states x⁰ and x¹ within [the slice] S.” (p.718)

In direct connection with the X validated question there is a whole section of the paper on implementing single-variable slice sampling that I had completely forgotten, with a collection of practical implementations when the slice

S={x; u < f(x) }

cannot be computed in an exact manner. Like the “stepping out” procedure. The resulting set (interval) where the uniform simulation in x takes place may well miss some connected component(s) of the slice. This quote may sound like a strange argument in that the move may well leave a part of the slice off and still satisfy this condition. Not really since it states that it must hold for any pair of states within S… The very positive side of this section is to allow for slice sampling in cases where the inversion of u < f(x) is intractable. Hence with a strong practical implication. The multivariate extension of the approximation procedure is more (potentially) fraught with danger in that it may fell victim to a curse of dimension, in that the box for the uniform simulation of x may be much too large when compared with the true slice (or slice of the slice). I had more of a memory of the “trail of crumbs” idea, mostly because of the name I am afraid!, which links with delayed rejection, as indicated in the paper, but seems awfully delicate to calibrate.