the tail of a fox

resampling methods

A paper that was arXived [and that I missed!] last summer is a work on resampling by Mathieu Gerber, Nicolas Chopin (CREST), and Nick Whiteley. Resampling is used to sample from a weighted empirical distribution and to correct for very small weights in a weighted sample that otherwise lead to degeneracy in sequential Monte Carlo (SMC). Since this step is based on random draws, it induces noise (while improving the estimation of the target), reducing this noise is preferable, hence the appeal of replacing plain multinomial sampling with more advanced schemes. The initial motivation is for sequential Monte Carlo where resampling is rife and seemingly compulsory, but this also applies to importance sampling when considering several schemes at once. I remember discussing alternative schemes with Nicolas, then completing his PhD, as well as Olivier Cappé, Randal Douc, and Eric Moulines at the time (circa 2004) we were working on the Hidden Markov book. And getting then a somewhat vague idea as to why systematic resampling failed to converge.

In this paper, Mathieu, Nicolas and Nick show that stratified sampling (where a uniform is generated on every interval of length 1/n) enjoys some form of consistent, while systematic sampling (where the “same” uniform is generated on every interval of length 1/n) does not necessarily enjoy this consistency. There actually exists cases where convergence does not occur. However, a residual version of systematic sampling (where systematic sampling is applied to the residuals of the decimal parts of the n-enlarged weights) is itself consistent.

The paper also studies the surprising feature uncovered by Kitagawa (1996) that stratified sampling applied to an ordered sample brings an error of O(1/n²) between the cdf rather than the usual O(1/n). It took me a while to even understand the distinction between the original and the ordered version (maybe because Nicolas used the empirical cdf during his SAD (Stochastic Algorithm Day!) talk, ecdf that is the same for ordered and initial samples).  And both systematic and deterministic sampling become consistent in this case. The result was shown in dimension one by Kitagawa (1996) but extends to larger dimensions via the magical trick of the Hilbert curve.

MCM 2017

And thus I am back in Montréal, for MCM 2017, located in HEC Montréal, on the campus of Université de Montréal, for three days. My talk is predictably about ABC, what else?!, gathering diverse threads from different talks and papers: