## distributed evidence

Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 16, 2021 by xi'an

Alexander Buchholz (who did his PhD at CREST with Nicolas Chopin), Daniel Ahfock, and my friend Sylvia Richardson published a great paper on the distributed computation of Bayesian evidence in Bayesian Analysis. The setting is one of distributed data from several sources with no communication between them, which relates to consensus Monte Carlo even though model choice has not been particularly studied from that perspective. The authors operate under the assumption of conditionally conjugate models, i.e., the existence of a data augmentation scheme into an exponential family so that conjugate priors can be used. For a division of the data into S blocks, the fundamental identity in the paper is

$p(y) = \alpha^S \prod_{s=1}^S \tilde p(y_s) \int \prod_{s=1}^S \tilde p(\theta|y_s)\,\text d\theta$

where α is the normalising constant of the sub-prior exp{log[p(θ)]/S} and the other terms are associated with this prior. Under the conditionally conjugate assumption, the integral can be approximated based on the latent variables. Most interestingly, the associated variance is directly connected with the variance of

$p(z_{1:S}|y)\Big/\prod_{s=1}^S \tilde p(z_s|y_s)$

under the joint:

“The variance of the ratio measures the quality of the product of the conditional sub-posterior as an importance sample proposal distribution.”

Assuming this variance is finite (which is likely). An approximate alternative is proposed, namely to replace the exact sub-posterior with a Normal distribution, as in consensus Monte Carlo, which should obviously require some consideration as to which parameterisation of the model produces the “most normal” (or the least abnormal!) posterior. And ensures a finite variance in the importance sampling approximation (as ensured by the strong bounds in Proposition 5). A problem shared by the bridgesampling package.

“…if the error that comes from MCMC sampling is relatively small and that the shard sizes are large enough so that the quality of the subposterior normal approximation is reasonable, our suggested approach will result in good approximations of the full data set marginal likelihood.”

The resulting approximation can also be handy in conjunction with reversible jump MCMC, in the sense that RJMCMC algorithms can be run in parallel on different chunks or shards of the entire dataset. Although the computing gain may be reduced by the need for separate approximations.

## black box MCMC

Posted in Books, Statistics with tags , , , , , , , , on July 17, 2021 by xi'an

“…back-box methods, despite using no information of the proposal distribution, can actually give better estimation accuracy than the typical importance sampling [methods]…”

Earlier this week I was pointed out to Liu & Lee’s black box importance sampling, published in AISTATS 2017. (which I did not attend). Already found in Briol et al. (2015) and Oates, Girolami, and Chopin (2017), the method starts from Charles Stein‘s “unbiased estimator of the loss” (that was a fundamental tool in my own PhD thesis!), a variation on integration by part:

$\mathbb E_p[\nabla\log p(X) f(X)+\nabla f(X)]=0$

for differentiable functions f and p cancelling at the boundaries. It also holds for the kernelised extension

$\mathbb E_p[k_p(X,x')]=0$

for all x’, where the integrand is a 1-d function of an arbitrary kernel k(x,x’) and of the score function ∇log p. This null expectation happens to be a minimum since

$\mathbb E_{X,X'\sim q}[k_p(X,X')]\ge 0$

and hence importance weights can be obtained by minimising

$\sum_{ij} w_i w_j k_p(x_i,x_j)$

in w (from the unit simplex), for a sample of iid realisations from a possibly unknown distribution with density q. Liu & Lee show that this approximation converges faster than the standard Monte Carlo speed √n, when using Hilbertian properties of the kernel through control variates. Actually, the same thing happens when using a (leave-one-out) non-parametric kernel estimate of q rather than q. At least in theory.

“…simulating n parallel MCMC chains for m steps, where the length m of the chains can be smaller than what is typically used in MCMC, because it just needs to be large enough to bring the distribution `roughly’ close to the target distribution”

A practical application of the concept is suggested in the above quote. As a corrected weight for interrupted MCMC. Or when using an unadjusted Langevin algorithm. Provided the minimisation of the objective quadratic form is fast enough, the method can thus be used as a benchmark for regular MCMC implementation.

## sandwiching a marginal

Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , on March 8, 2021 by xi'an

When working recently on a paper for estimating the marginal likelihood, I was pointed out this earlier 2015 paper by Roger Grosse, Zoubin Ghahramani and Ryan Adams, which had escaped till now. The beginning of the paper discusses the shortcomings of importance sampling (when simulating from the prior) and harmonic mean (when simulating from the posterior) as solution. And of anNealed importance sampling (when simulating from a sequence, which sequence?!, of targets). The authors are ending up proposing a sequential Monte Carlo or (posterior) particle learning solution. A remark on annealed importance sampling is that there exist both a forward and a backward version for estimating the marginal likelihood, either starting from a simulation from the prior (easy) or from a simulation from the posterior (hard!). As in, e.g., Nicolas Chopin’s thesis, the intermediate steps are constructed from a subsample of the entire sample.

In this context, unbiasedness can be misleading: because partition function estimates can vary over many orders of magnitude, it’s common for an unbiased estimator to drastically underestimate Ζ with overwhelming probability, yet occasionally return extremely large estimates. (An extreme example is likelihood weighting, which is unbiased, but is extremely unlikely to give an accurate answer for a high-dimensional model.) Unless the estimator is chosen very carefully, the variance is likely to be extremely large, or even infinite.”

One novel aspect of the paper is to advocate for the simultaneous use of different methods and for producing both lower and upper bounds on the marginal p(y) and wait for them to get close enough. It is however delicate to find upper bounds, except when using the dreaded harmonic mean estimator.  (A nice trick associated with reverse annealed importance sampling is that the reverse chain can be simulated exactly from the posterior if associated with simulated data, except I am rather lost at the connection between the actual and simulated data.) In a sequential harmonic mean version, the authors also look at the dangers of using an harmonic mean but argue the potential infinite variance of the weights does not matter so much for log p(y), without displaying any variance calculation… The paper also contains a substantial experimental section that compares the different solutions evoked so far, plus others like nested sampling. Which did not work poorly in the experiment (see below) but could not be trusted to provide a lower or an upper bound. The computing time to achieve some level of agreement is however rather daunting. An interesting read definitely (and I wonder what happened to the paper in the end).

## marginal likelihood with large amounts of missing data

Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics with tags , , , , , , , , on October 20, 2020 by xi'an

In 2018, Panayiota Touloupou, research fellow at Warwick, and her co-authors published a paper in Bayesian analysis that somehow escaped my radar, despite standing in my first circle of topics of interest! They construct an importance sampling approach to the approximation of the marginal likelihood, the importance function being approximated from a preliminary MCMC run, and consider the special case when the sampling density (i.e., the likelihood) can be represented as the marginal of a joint density. While this demarginalisation perspective is rather usual, the central point they make is that it is more efficient to estimate the sampling density based on the auxiliary or latent variables than to consider the joint posterior distribution of parameter and latent in the importance sampler. This induces a considerable reduction in dimension and hence explains (in part) why the approach should prove more efficient. Even though the approximation itself is costly, at about 5 seconds per marginal likelihood. But a nice feature of the paper is to include the above graph that includes both computing time and variability for different methods (the blue range corresponding to the marginal importance solution, the red range to RJMCMC and the green range to Chib’s estimate). Note that bridge sampling does not appear on the picture but returns a variability that is similar to the proposed methodology.

## neural importance sampling

Posted in Books, Kids, pictures, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , on May 13, 2020 by xi'an

Dennis Prangle signaled this paper during his talk of last week, first of our ABC ‘minars now rechristened as The One World ABC Seminar to join the “One World xxx Seminar” franchise! The paper is written by Thomas Müller and co-authors, all from Disney research [hence the illustration], and we discussed it in our internal reading seminar at Dauphine. The authors propose to parameterise the importance sampling density via neural networks, just like Dennis is using auto-encoders. Starting with the goal of approximating

$\mathfrak I=\int_{\mathfrak D} f(x)\text{d}x$

(where they should assume f to be non-negative for the following), the authors aim at simulating from an approximation of f(x)/ℑ since this “ideal” pdf would give zero variance.

“Unfortunately, the above integral is often not solvable in closed form, necessitating its estimation with another Monte Carlo estimator.”

Among the discussed solutions, the Latent-Variable Model one is based on a pdf represented as a marginal. A mostly intractable integral, which the authors surprisingly seem to deem an issue as they do not mention the standard solution of simulating from the joint and using the conditional in the importance weight. (Or even more surprisingly and obviously wrongly see the latter as a biased approximation to the weight.)

“These “autoregressive flows” offer the desired exact evaluation of q(x;θ). Unfortunately, they generally only permit either efficient sample generation or efficient evaluation of q(x;θ), which makes them prohibitively expensive for our application to Mont Carlo integration.”

When presenting normalizing flows, namely the representation of the simulation output as the result of an invertible mapping of a standard (e.g., Gaussian or Uniform) random variable, x=h(u,θ), which can itself be decomposed into a composition of suchwise functions. And I am thus surprised this cannot be done in an efficient manner if transforms are well chosen…

“The key proposition of Dinh et al. (2014) is to focus on a specific class of mappings—referred to as coupling layers—that admit Jacobian matrices where determinants reduce to the product of diagonal terms.

Using a transform with a triangular Jacobian at each stage has the appeal of keeping the change of variable simple and allowing for non-linear transforms. Namely piecewise polynomials. When reading the one-blob (!) encoding , I am however uncertain the approach is more than the choice of a particular functional basis, as for instance wavelets (which may prove more costly to handle, granted!)

“Given that NICE scales well to high-dimensional problems…”

It is always unclear to me why almost every ML paper feels the urge to redefine & motivate the KL divergence. And to recall that it avoids bothering about the normalising constant. Looking at the variance of the MC estimator & seeking minimal values is praiseworthy, but only when the variance exists. What are the guarantees on the density estimate for this to happen? And where are the arguments for NICE scaling nicely to high dimensions? Interesting intrusion of path sampling, but is it of any use outside image analysis—I had forgotten Eric Veach’s original work was on light transport—?