variational approximation to empirical likelihood ABC

Sanjay Chaudhuri and his colleagues from Singapore arXived last year a paper on a novel version of empirical likelihood ABC that I hadn’t yet found time to read. This proposal connects with our own, published with Kerrie Mengersen and Pierre Pudlo in 2013 in PNAS. It is presented as an attempt at approximating the posterior distribution based on a vector of (summary) statistics, the variational approximation (or information projection) appearing in the construction of the sampling distribution of the observed summary. (Along with a weird eyed-g symbol! I checked inside the original LaTeX file and it happens to be a mathbbmtt g, that is, the typewriter version of a blackboard computer modern g…) Which writes as an entropic correction of the true posterior distribution (in Theorem 1).

“First, the true log-joint density of the observed summary, the summaries of the i.i.d. replicates and the parameter have to be estimated. Second, we need to estimate the expectation of the above log-joint density with respect to the distribution of the data generating process. Finally, the differential entropy of the data generating density needs to be estimated from the m replicates…”

The density of the observed summary is estimated by empirical likelihood, but I do not understand the reasoning behind the moment condition used in this empirical likelihood. Indeed the moment made of the difference between the observed summaries and the observed ones is zero iff the true value of the parameter is used in the simulation. I also fail to understand the connection with our SAME procedure (Doucet, Godsill & X, 2002), in that the empirical likelihood is based on a sample made of pairs (observed,generated) where the observed part is repeated m times, indeed, but not with the intent of approximating a marginal likelihood estimator… The notion of using the actual data instead of the true expectation (i.e. as a unbiased estimator) at the true parameter value is appealing as it avoids specifying the exact (or analytical) value of this expectation (as in our approach), but I am missing the justification for the extension to any parameter value. Unless one uses an ancillary statistic, which does not sound pertinent… The differential entropy is estimated by a Kozachenko-Leonenko estimator implying k-nearest neighbours.

“The proposed empirical likelihood estimates weights by matching the moments of g(X¹), …, g(X⁹) with that of
g(X⁰), without requiring a direct relationship with the parameter. (…) the constraints used in the construction of the empirical likelihood are based on the identity in (7), which can only be satisfied when θ = θ⁰. “

Although I am feeling like missing one argument, the later part of the paper seems to comfort my impression, as quoted above. Meaning that the approximation will fare well only in the vicinity of the true parameter. Which makes it untrustworthy for model choice purposes, I believe. (The paper uses the g-and-k benchmark without exploiting Pierre Jacob’s package that allows for exact MCMC implementation.)

back to Ockham’s razor

“All in all, the Bayesian argument for selecting the MAP model as the single ‘best’ model is suggestive but not compelling.”

Last month, Jonty Rougier and Carey Priebe arXived a paper on Ockham’s factor, with a generalisation of a prior distribution acting as a regulariser, R(θ). Calling on the late David MacKay to argue that the evidence involves the correct penalising factor although they acknowledge that his central argument is not absolutely convincing, being based on a first-order Laplace approximation to the posterior distribution and hence “dubious”. The current approach stems from the candidate’s formula that is already at the core of Sid Chib’s method. The log evidence then decomposes as the sum of the maximum log-likelihood minus the log of the posterior-to-prior ratio at the MAP estimator. Called the flexibility.

“Defining model complexity as flexibility unifies the Bayesian and Frequentist justifications for selecting a single model by maximizing the evidence.”

While they bring forward rational arguments to consider this as a measure model complexity, it remains at an informal level in that other functions of this ratio could be used as well. This is especially hard to accept by non-Bayesians in that it (seriously) depends on the choice of the prior distribution, as all transforms of the evidence would. I am thus skeptical about the reception of the argument by frequentists…