séminaire parisien de statistique [09/01/23]

I had missed the séminaire parisien de statistique for most of the Fall semester, hence was determined to attend the first session of the year 2023, the more because the talks were close to my interest. To wit, Chiara Amorino spoke about particle systems for McKean-Vlasov SDEs, when those are parameterised by several parameters, when observing repeatedly discretised versions, hereby establishing the consistence of a contrast estimator of these estimators. I was initially confused by the mention of interacting particles, since the work is not at all about related with simulation. Just wondering whether this contrast could prove useful for a likelihood-free approach in building a Gibbs distribution?

Valentin de Bortoli then spoke on diffusion Schrödinger bridges for generative models, which allowed me to better my understanding of this idea presented by Arnaud at the Flatiron workshop last November. The presentation here was quite different, using a forward versus backward explanation via a sequence of transforms that end up approximately Gaussian, once more reminiscent of sequential Monte Carlo. The transforms are themselves approximate Gaussian versions relying on adiscretised Ornstein-Ulhenbeck process, with a missing score term since said score involves a marginal density at each step of the sequence. It can be represented [as below] as an expectation conditional on the (observed) variate at time zero (with a connection with Hyvärinen’s NCE / score matching!) Practical implementation is done via neural networks.

Last but not least!, my friend Randal talked about his Kick-Kac formula, which connects with the one we considered in our 2004 paper with Jim Hobert. While I had heard earlier version, this talk was mostly on probability aspects and highly enjoyable as he included some short proofs. The formula is expressing the stationary probability measure π of the original Markov chain in terms of explorations between two visits to an accessible set C, more general than a small set. With at first an annoying remaining term due to the set not being Harris recurrent but which eventually cancels out. Memoryless transportation can be implemented because C is free for the picking, for instance the set where the target is bounded by a manageable density, allowing for an accept-reject step. The resulting chain is non-reversible. However, due to the difficulty to simulate from the target restricted to C, a second and parallel Markov chain is instead created. Performances, unsurprisingly, depend on the choice of C, but it can be adapted to the target on the go.

yet another opportunity in a summer of Briton conferences, free of charge!

bouncy particle sampler

 Alexandre Bouchard-Coté, Sebastian Vollmer and Arnaud Doucet just arXived a paper with the above title, which reminded me of a proposal Kerrie Mengersen and I made at Valencia 7, in Tenerife, the [short-lived!] pinball sampler. This sampler was a particle (MCMC) sampler where we used the location of the other particles to avoid their neighbourhood, by bouncing away from them according to a delayed rejection principle, with an overall Gibbs justification since the resulting target was the product of copies of the target distribution. The difficulty in implementing the (neat!) idea was in figuring out the amount of bouncing or, in more physical terms, the energy allocated to the move.

In the current paper, inspired from an earlier paper in physics, the Markov chain (or single particle) evolves by linear moves, changing directions according to a Poisson process, with intensity and direction depending on the target distribution. A local version takes advantage of a decomposition of the target into a product of terms involving only some components of the whole parameter to be simulated. And hence allowing for moves in subspaces. An extension proposed by the authors is to bounce along the Hamiltonian isoclines. The method is demonstrably ergodic and irreducible. In practice, I wonder at the level of calibration or preliminary testing required to facilitate the exploration of the parameter space, particularly in the local version that seems to multiply items to be calibrated.

interacting particle systems as… facebook

Among the many interesting arXived papers this Friday, I first read David Aldous’ “Interacting particle systems as stochastic social dynamics“. Being unfamiliar with those systems (despite having experts in offices down the hall in Paris-Dauphine!), I read this typology of potential models (published in Bernoulli) with a keen interest! The paper stemmed from a short course given in 2012 in Warwick and Cornell. I think the links exhibited there with (social) networks should be relevant for statisticians working on networks (!) and dynamic graphical models. Statistics is not mentioned in the paper, except for the (misleading) connection with statistical physics, but there is obviously a huge potential for statistical inference, from parameter estimation to model comparison. (As pointed out by David Aldous, there is usually “no data or evidence linking the model to the asserted real-world phenomena”.) The paper then introduces some basic models like the token, the pandemic and the averaging process, plus the voter model that relates to Kingman’s coalescent. A very nice read opening new vistas for sure (and a source of projects for graduate students most certainly!)