## covariant priors, Jeffreys and paradoxes

Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , on February 9, 2016 by xi'an

“If no information is available, π(α|M) must not deliver information about α.”

In a recent arXival apparently submitted to Bayesian Analysis, Giovanni Mana and Carlo Palmisano discuss of the choice of priors in metrology. Which reminded me of this meeting I attended at the Bureau des Poids et Mesures in Sèvres where similar debates took place, albeit being led by ferocious anti-Bayesians! Their reference prior appears to be the Jeffreys prior, because of its reparameterisation invariance.

“The relevance of the Jeffreys rule in metrology and in expressing uncertainties in measurements resides in the metric invariance.”

This, along with a second order approximation to the Kullback-Leibler divergence, is indeed one reason for advocating the use of a Jeffreys prior. I at first found it surprising that the (usually improper) prior is used in a marginal likelihood, as it cannot be normalised. A source of much debate [and of our alternative proposal].

“To make a meaningful posterior distribution and uncertainty assessment, the prior density must be covariant; that is, the prior distributions of different parameterizations must be obtained by transformations of variables. Furthermore, it is necessary that the prior densities are proper.”

The above quote is quite interesting both in that the notion of covariant is used rather than invariant or equivariant. And in that properness is indicated as a requirement. (Even more surprising is the noun associated with covariant, since it clashes with the usual notion of covariance!) They conclude that the marginal associated with an improper prior is null because the normalising constant of the prior is infinite.

“…the posterior probability of a selected model must not be null; therefore, improper priors are not allowed.”

## Measuring statistical evidence using relative belief [book review]

Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 22, 2015 by xi'an

“It is necessary to be vigilant to ensure that attempts to be mathematically general do not lead us to introduce absurdities into discussions of inference.” (p.8)

This new book by Michael Evans (Toronto) summarises his views on statistical evidence (expanded in a large number of papers), which are a quite unique mix of Bayesian  principles and less-Bayesian methodologies. I am quite glad I could receive a version of the book before it was published by CRC Press, thanks to Rob Carver (and Keith O’Rourke for warning me about it). [Warning: this is a rather long review and post, so readers may chose to opt out now!]

“The Bayes factor does not behave appropriately as a measure of belief, but it does behave appropriately as a measure of evidence.” (p.87)

Posted in Books, Kids, R, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , on May 27, 2015 by xi'an

Another trip in the métro today (to work with Pierre Jacob and Lawrence Murray in a Paris Anticafé!, as the University was closed) led me to infer—warning!, this is not the exact distribution!—the distribution of x, namely

$f(x|N) = \frac{4^p}{4^{\ell+2p}} {\ell+p \choose p}\,\mathbb{I}_{N=\ell+2p}$

since a path x of length l(x) will corresponds to N draws if N-l(x) is an even integer 2p and p undistinguishable annihilations in 4 possible directions have to be distributed over l(x)+1 possible locations, with Feller’s number of distinguishable distributions as a result. With a prior π(N)=1/N on N, hence on p, the posterior on p is given by

$\pi(p|x) \propto 4^{-p} {\ell+p \choose p} \frac{1}{\ell+2p}$

Now, given N and  x, the probability of no annihilation on the last round is 1 when l(x)=N and in general

$\frac{4^p}{4^{\ell+2p}}{\ell-1+p \choose p}\big/\frac{4^p}{4^{\ell+2p}}{\ell+p \choose p}=\frac{\ell}{\ell+p}=\frac{2\ell}{N+\ell}$

which can be integrated against the posterior. The numerical expectation is represented for a range of values of l(x) in the above graph. Interestingly, the posterior probability is constant for l(x) large  and equal to 0.8125 under a flat prior over N.

Getting back to Pierre Druilhet’s approach, he sets a flat prior on the length of the path θ and from there derives that the probability of annihilation is about 3/4. However, “the uniform prior on the paths of lengths lower or equal to M” used for this derivation which gives a probability of length l proportional to 3l is quite different from the distribution of l(θ) given a number of draws N. Which as shown above looks much more like a Binomial B(N,1/2).

However, being not quite certain about the reasoning involving Fieller’s trick, I ran an ABC experiment under a flat prior restricted to (l(x),4l(x)) and got the above, where the histogram is for a posterior sample associated with l(x)=195 and the gold curve is the potential posterior. Since ABC is exact in this case (i.e., I only picked N’s for which l(x)=195), ABC is not to blame for the discrepancy! I asked about the distribution on Stack Exchange maths forum (and a few colleagues here as well) but got no reply so far… Here is the R code that goes with the ABC implementation:

#observation:
elo=195
#ABC version
T=1e6
el=rep(NA,T)
N=sample(elo:(4*elo),T,rep=TRUE)
for (t in 1:T){
#generate a path
paz=sample(c(-(1:2),1:2),N[t],rep=TRUE)
#eliminate U-turns
uturn=paz[-N[t]]==-paz[-1]
while (sum(uturn>0)){
uturn[-1]=uturn[-1]*(1-
uturn[-(length(paz)-1)])
uturn=c((1:(length(paz)-1))[uturn==1],
(2:length(paz))[uturn==1])
paz=paz[-uturn]
uturn=paz[-length(paz)]==-paz[-1]
}
el[t]=length(paz)}
#subsample to get exact posterior
poster=N[abs(el-elo)==0]


Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , on May 15, 2015 by xi'an

[Here is a reply by Pierre Druihlet to my comments on his paper.]

There are several goals in the paper, the last one being the most important one.

The first one is to insist that considering θ as a parameter is not appropriate. We are in complete agreement on that point, but I prefer considering l(θ) as the parameter rather than N, mainly because it is much simpler. Knowing N, the law of l(θ) is given by the law of a random walk with 0 as reflexive boundary (Jaynes in his book, explores this link). So for a given prior on N, we can derive a prior on l(θ). Since the random process that generate N is completely unknown, except that N is probably large, the true law of l(θ) is completely unknown, so we may consider l(θ).

The second one is to state explicitly that a flat prior on θ implies an exponentially increasing prior on l(θ). As an anecdote, Stone, in 1972, warned against this kind of prior for Gaussian models. Another interesting anecdote is that he cited the novel by Abbot “Flatland : a romance of many dimension” who described a world where the dimension is changed. This is exactly the case in the FP since θ has to be seen in two dimensions rather than in one dimension.

The third one is to make a distinction between randomness of the parameter and prior distribution, each one having its own rule. This point is extensively discussed in Section 2.3.
– In the intuitive reasoning, the probability of no annihilation involves the true joint distribution on (θ, x) and therefore the true unknown distribution of θ,.
– In the Bayesian reasoning, the posterior probability of no annihilation is derived from the prior distribution which is improper. The underlying idea is that a prior distribution does not obey probability rules but belongs to a projective space of measure. This is especially true if the prior does not represent an accurate knowledge. In that case, there is no discontinuity between proper and improper priors and therefore the impropriety of the distribution is not a key point. In that context, the joint and marginal distributions are irrelevant, not because the prior is improper, but because it is a prior and not a true law. If the prior were the true probability law of θ,, then the flat distribution could not be considered as a limit of probability distributions.

For most applications, the distinction between prior and probability law is not necessary and even pedantic, but it may appear essential in some situations. For example, in the Jeffreys-Lindley paradox, we may note that the construction of the prior is not compatible with the projective space structure.

Posted in Books, Kids, R, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , on May 13, 2015 by xi'an

Pierre Druilhet arXived a note a few days ago about the Flatland paradox (due to Stone, 1976) and his arguments against the flat prior. The paradox in this highly artificial setting is as follows:  Consider a sequence θ of N independent draws from {a,b,1/a,1/b} such that

1. N and θ are unknown;
2. a draw followed by its inverse and this inverse are removed from θ;
3. the successor x of θ is observed, meaning an extra draw is made and the above rule applied.

Then the frequentist probability that x is longer than θ given θ is at least 3/4—at least because θ could be zero—while the posterior probability that x is longer than θ given x is 1/4 under the flat prior over θ. Paradox that 3/4 and 1/4 clash. Not so much of a paradox because there is no joint probability distribution over (x,θ).

The paradox was actually discussed at length in Larry Wasserman’s now defunct Normal Variate. From which I borrowed Larry’s graphical representation of the four possible values of θ given the (green) endpoint of x. Larry uses the Flatland paradox hammer to fix another nail on the coffin he contemplates for improper priors. And all things Bayes. Pierre (like others before him) argues against the flat prior on θ and shows that a flat prior on the length of θ leads to recover 3/4 as the posterior probability that x is longer than θ.

As I was reading the paper in the métro yesterday morning, I became less and less satisfied with the whole analysis of the problem in that I could not perceive θ as a parameter of the model. While this may sound a pedantic distinction, θ is a latent variable (or a random effect) associated with x in a model where the only unknown parameter is N, the total number of draws used to produce θ and x. The distributions of both θ and x are entirely determined by N. (In that sense, the flatland paradox can be seen as a marginalisation paradox in that an improper prior on N cannot be interpreted as projecting a prior on θ.) Given N, the distribution of x of length l(x) is then 1/4N times the number of ways of picking (N-l(x)) annihilation steps among N. Using a prior on N like 1/N , which is improper, then leads to favour the shortest path as well. (After discussing the issue with Pierre Druilhet, I realised he had a similar perspective on the issue. Except that he puts a flat prior on the length l(x).) Looking a wee bit further for references, I also found that Bruce Hill had adopted the same perspective of a prior on N.

## Approximate Integrated Likelihood via ABC methods

Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , on March 13, 2014 by xi'an

My PhD student Clara Grazian just arXived this joint work with Brunero Liseo on using ABC for marginal density estimation. The idea in this paper is to produce an integrated likelihood approximation in intractable problems via the ratio

$L(\psi|x)\propto \dfrac{\pi(\psi|x)}{\pi(\psi)}$

both terms in the ratio being estimated from simulations,

$\hat L(\psi|x) \propto \dfrac{\hat\pi^\text{ABC}(\psi|x)}{\hat\pi(\psi)}$

(with possible closed form for the denominator). Although most of the examples processed in the paper (Poisson means ratio, Neyman-Scott’s problem, g-&-k quantile distribution, semi-parametric regression) rely on summary statistics, hence de facto replacing the numerator above with a pseudo-posterior conditional on those summaries, the approximation remains accurate (for those examples). In the g-&-k quantile example, Clara and Brunero compare our ABC-MCMC algorithm with the one of Allingham et al. (2009, Statistics & Computing): the later does better by not replicating values in the Markov chain but instead proposing a new value until it is accepted by the usual Metropolis step. (Although I did not spend much time on this issue, I cannot see how both approaches could be simultaneously correct. Even though the outcomes do not look very different.) As noted by the authors, “the main drawback of the present approach is that it requires the use of proper priors”, unless the marginalisation of the prior can be done analytically. (This is an interesting computational problem: how to provide an efficient approximation to a marginal density of a σ-finite measure, assuming this density exists.)

Clara will give a talk at CREST-ENSAE today about this work, in the Bayes in Paris seminar: 2pm in room 18.

## Robins and Wasserman

Posted in Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , on January 17, 2013 by xi'an

As I attended Jamie Robins’ session in Varanasi and did not have a clear enough idea of the Robbins and Wasserman paradox to discuss it viva vocce, here are my thoughts after reading Larry’s summary. My first reaction was to question whether or not this was a Bayesian statistical problem (meaning why should I be concered with the problem). Just as the normalising constant problem was not a statistical problem. We are estimating an integral given some censored realisations of a binomial depending on a covariate through an unknown function θ(x). There is not much of a parameter. However, the way Jamie presented it thru clinical trials made the problem sound definitely statistical. So end of the silly objection. My second step is to consider the very point of estimating the entire function (or infinite dimensional parameter) θ(x) when only the integral ψ is of interest. This is presumably the reason why the Bayesian approach fails as it sounds difficult to consistently estimate θ(x) under censored binomial observations, while ψ can be. Of course, if we want to estimate the probability of a success like ψ going through functional estimation this sounds like overshooting. But the Bayesian modelling of the problem appears to require considering all unknowns at once, including the function θ(x) and cannot forget about it. We encountered a somewhat similar problem with Jean-Michel Marin when working on the k-nearest neighbour classification problem. Considering all the points in the testing sample altogether as unknowns would dwarf the training sample and its information content to produce very poor inference. And so we ended up dealing with one point at a time after harsh and intense discussions! Now, back to the Robins and Wasserman paradox, I see no problem in acknowledging a classical Bayesian approach cannot produce a convergent estimate of the integral ψ. Simply because the classical Bayesian approach is an holistic system that cannot remove information to process a subset of the original problem. Call it the curse of marginalisation. Now, on a practical basis, would there be ways of running simulations of the missing Y’s when π(x) is known in order to achieve estimates of ψ? Presumably, but they would end up with a frequentist validation…