IMS workshop [day 3]

I made the “capital” mistake of walking across the entire NUS campus this morning, which is quite green and pretty, but which almost enjoys an additional dimension brought by such an intense humidity that one feels having to get around this humidity!, a feature I have managed to completely erase from my memory of my previous visit there. Anyway, nothing of any relevance. oNE talk in the morning was by Markus Eisenbach on tools used by physicists to speed up Monte Carlo methods, like the Wang-Landau flat histogram, towards computing the partition function, or the distribution of the energy levels, definitely addressing issues close to my interest, but somewhat beyond my reach for using a different language and stress, as often in physics. (I mean, as often in physics talks I attend.) An idea that came out clear to me was to bypass a (flat) histogram target and aim directly at a constant slope cdf for the energy levels. (But got scared away by the Fourier transforms!)

Lawrence Murray then discussed some features of the Birch probabilistic programming language he is currently developing, especially a fairly fascinating concept of delayed sampling, which connects with locally-optimal proposals and Rao Blackwellisation. Which I plan to get back to later [and hopefully sooner than later!].

In the afternoon, Maria de Iorio gave a talk about the construction of nonparametric priors that create dependence between a sequence of functions, a notion I had not thought of before, with an array of possibilities when using the stick breaking construction of Dirichlet processes.

And Christophe Andrieu gave a very smooth and helpful entry to partly deterministic Markov processes (PDMP) in preparation for talks he is giving next week for the continuation of the workshop at IMS. Starting with the guided random walk of Gustafson (1998), which extended a bit later into the non-reversible paper of Diaconis, Holmes, and Neal (2000). Although I had a vague idea of the contents of these papers, the role of the velocity ν became much clearer. And premonitory of the advances made by the more recent PDMP proposals. There is obviously a continuation with the equally pedagogical talk Christophe gave at MCqMC in Rennes two months [and half the globe] ago,  but the focus being somewhat different, it really felt like a new talk [my short term memory may also play some role in this feeling!, as I now remember the discussion of Hilderbrand (2002) for non-reversible processes]. An introduction to the topic I would recommend to anyone interested in this new branch of Monte Carlo simulation! To be followed by the most recently arXived hypocoercivity paper by Christophe and co-authors.

IMS workshop [day 2]

Here are the slides of my talk today on using Wasserstein distances as an intrinsic distance measure in ABC, as developed in our papers with Espen Bernton, Pierre Jacob, and Mathieu Gerber:

This morning, Gael Martin discussed the surprising aspects of ABC prediction, expanding upon her talk at ISBA, with several threads very much worth weaving in the ABC tapestry, one being that summary statistics need be used to increase the efficiency of the prediction, as well as more adapted measures of distance. Her talk also led me ponder about the myriad of possibilities available or not in the most generic of ABC predictions (which is not the framework of Gael’s talk). If we imagine a highly intractable setting, it may be that the marginal generation of a predicted value at time t+1 requires the generation of the entire past from time 1 till time t. Possibly because of a massive dependence on latent variables. And the absence of particle filters. if this makes any sense. Therefore, based on a generated parameter value θ it may be that the entire series needs be simulated to reach the last value in the series. Even when unnecessary this may be an alternative to conditioning upon the actual series. In this later case, comparing both predictions may act as a natural measure of distance since one prediction is a function or statistic of the actual data while the other is a function of the simulated data. Another direction I mused about is the use of (handy) auxiliary models, each producing a prediction as a new statistic, which could then be merged and weighted (or even selected) by a random forest procedure. Again, if the auxiliary models are relatively well-behaved, timewise, this would be quite straightforward to implement.