## importance tempering and variable selection

Posted in Books, Statistics with tags , , , , , , , , on November 6, 2018 by xi'an

As reading and commenting the importance tempering for variable selection paper by Giacomo Zanella (previously Warwick) and Gareth Roberts (Warwick) has been on my to-do list for quite a while, the fact that Giacomo presented this work at CIRM Bayesian Masterclass last week was the right nudge to write this post.

The starting point for the method is to simulate from a tempered version of a Gibbs sampler, selecting the component [of the parameter vector θ] according to an importance weight that is the inverse of the conditional posterior to the complementary power. That is, the inverse of the importance weight. This approach differs from classical (MCMC) tempering in that it does not target the original distribution. Hence it produces a weighted sample, whose computing time is of the order of the dimension of θ, even though the tempered simulation of a single conditional can reduce the variance of the estimator. The method is generalisable to any collection of one-component proposal/importance distributions, with the assumption that they have fatter tails that the true conditionals. The resulting Markov chain is reversible with respect to another stationary measure made of the original distribution multiplied by the normalisation factor of the importance weights but this ensures that weighted averages converge to the right quantity. Interestingly so because the powered conditionals are not necessarily coherent from a Gibbsic perspective.

The method is applied to Bayesian [spike-and-slab] variable selection of variables, the importance selection of a subset of covariates being restricted to changing one index at a time. I did not understand first how the computation of the normalising constant avoids involving 2-to-the-power-p terms until Giacomo explained to me that the constant was only computed for conditionals. The complexity gets down from O(|γ|²) to O(|γ|p), where |γ| is the number of variables. Another question I had was about the tempering power β, which selection remains a wee bit of an art!

## Gibbs for incompatible kids

Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , on September 27, 2018 by xi'an

In continuation of my earlier post on Bayesian GANs, which resort to strongly incompatible conditionals, I read a 2015 paper of Chen and Ip that I had missed. (Published in the Journal of Statistical Computation and Simulation which I first confused with JCGS and which I do not know at all. Actually, when looking at its editorial board,  I recognised only one name.) But the study therein is quite disappointing and not helping as it considers Markov chains on finite state spaces, meaning that the transition distributions are matrices, meaning also that convergence is ensured if these matrices have no null probability term. And while the paper is motivated by realistic situations where incompatible conditionals can reasonably appear, the paper only produces illustrations on two and three states Markov chains. Not that helpful, in the end… The game is still afoot!

## Bayesian gan [gan style]

Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 26, 2018 by xi'an

In their paper Bayesian GANS, arXived a year ago, Saatchi and Wilson consider a Bayesian version of generative adversarial networks, putting priors on both the model and the discriminator parameters. While the prospect seems somewhat remote from genuine statistical inference, if the following statement is representative

“GANs transform white noise through a deep neural network to generate candidate samples from a data distribution. A discriminator learns, in a supervised manner, how to tune its parameters so as to correctly classify whether a given sample has come from the generator or the true data distribution. Meanwhile, the generator updates its parameters so as to fool the discriminator. As long as the generator has sufficient capacity, it can approximate the cdf inverse-cdf composition required to sample from a data distribution of interest.”

I figure the concept can also apply to a standard statistical model, where x=G(z,θ) rephrases the distributional assumption x~F(x;θ) via a white noise z. This makes resorting to a prior distribution on θ more relevant in the sense of using potential prior information on θ (although the successes of probabilistic numerics show formal priors can be used on purely numerical ground).

The “posterior distribution” that is central to the notion of Bayesian GANs is however unorthodox in that the distribution is associated with the following conditional posteriors

where D(x,θ) is the “discriminator”, that is, in GAN lingo, the probability to be allocated to the “true” data generating mechanism rather than to the one associated with G(·,θ). The generative conditional posterior (1) then aims at fooling the discriminator, i.e. favours generative parameter values that raise the probability of wrong allocation of the pseudo-data. The discriminative conditional posterior (2) is a standard Bayesian posterior based on the original sample and the generated sample. The authors then iteratively sample from these posteriors, effectively implementing a two-stage Gibbs sampler.

“By iteratively sampling from (1) and (2) at every step of an epoch one can, in the limit, obtain samples from the approximate posteriors over [both sets of parameters].”

What worries me about this approach is that  just cannot work, in the sense that (1) and (2) cannot be compatible conditional (posterior) distributions. There is no joint distribution for which (1) and (2) would be the conditionals, since the pseudo-data appears in D for (1) and (1-D) in (2). This means that the convergence of a Gibbs sampler is at best to a stationary σ-finite measure. And hence that the meaning of the chain is delicate to ascertain… Am I missing any fundamental point?! [I checked the reviews on NIPS webpage and could not spot this issue being raised.]

## adaptive independent Metropolis-Hastings

Posted in Statistics with tags , , , , , , on May 8, 2018 by xi'an

When rereading this paper by Halden et al. (2009), I was reminded of the earlier and somewhat under-appreciated Gåsemyr (2003). But I find the convergence results therein rather counter-intuitive in that they seem to justify adaptive independent proposals with no strong requirement. Besides the massive Doeblin condition:

“The Doeblin condition essentially requires that all the proposal distribution [sic] has uniformly heavier tails than the target distribution.”

Even when the adaptation is based on an history vector made of rejected values and non-replicated accepted values. Actually  convergence of this sequence of adaptive proposals kernels is established under a concentration of the Doeblin constants a¹,a²,… towards one, in the sense that

E[(1-a¹)(1-a²)…]=0.

The reason may be that, with chains satisfying a Doeblin condition, there is a probability to reach stationarity at each step. Equal to a¹, a², … And hence to ignore adaptivity since each kernel keep the target π invariant. So in the end this is not so astounding. (The paper also reminded me of Wolfgang [or Vincent] Doeblin‘s short and tragic life.)

## Gibbs for kidds

Posted in Books, Kids, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 12, 2018 by xi'an

A chance (?) question on X validated brought me to re-read Gibbs for Kids, 25 years after it was written (by my close friends George and Ed). The originator of the question had difficulties with the implementation, apparently missing the cyclic pattern of the sampler, as in equations (2.3) and (2.4), and with the convergence, which is only processed for a finite support in the American Statistician paper. The paper [which did not appear in American Statistician under this title!, but inspired an animal bredeer, Dan Gianola, to write a “Gibbs for pigs” presentation in 1993 at the 44th Annual Meeting of the European Association for Animal Production, Aarhus, Denmark!!!] most appropriately only contains toy examples since those can be processed and compared to know stationary measures. This is for instance the case for the auto-exponential model

$f(x,y) \propto exp(-xy)$

which is only defined as a probability density for a compact support. (The paper does not identify the model as a special case of auto-exponential model, which apparently made the originator of the model, Julian Besag in 1974, unhappy, as George and I found out when visiting Bath, where Julian was spending the final year of his life, many years later.) I use the limiting case all the time in class to point out that a Gibbs sampler can be devised and operate without a stationary probability distribution. However, being picky!, I would like to point out that, contrary, to a comment made in the paper, the Gibbs sampler does not “fail” but on the contrary still “converges” in this case, in the sense that a conditional ergodic theorem applies, i.e., the ratio of the frequencies of visits to two sets A and B with finite measure do converge to the ratio of these measures. For instance, running the Gibbs sampler 10⁶ steps and ckecking for the relative frequencies of x’s in (1,2) and (1,3) gives 0.685, versus log(2)/log(3)=0.63, since 1/x is the stationary measure. One important and influential feature of the paper is to stress that proper conditionals do not imply proper joints. George would work much further on that topic, in particular with his PhD student at the time, my friend Jim Hobert.

With regard to the convergence issue, Gibbs for Kids points out to Schervish and Carlin (1990), which came quite early when considering Gelfand and Smith published their initial paper the very same year, but which also adopts a functional approach to convergence, along the paper’s fixed point perspective, somehow complicating the matter. Later papers by Tierney (1994), Besag (1995), and Mengersen and Tweedie (1996) considerably simplified the answer, which is that irreducibility is a necessary and sufficient condition for convergence. (Incidentally, the reference list includes a technical report of mine’s on latent variable model MCMC implementation that never got published.)

## flea circus

Posted in Books, Kids, pictures, R, Statistics with tags , , , , , , , , , , , on December 8, 2016 by xi'an

An old riddle found on X validated asking for Monte Carlo resolution  but originally given on Project Euler:

A 30×30 grid of squares contains 30² fleas, initially one flea per square. When a bell is rung, each flea jumps to an adjacent square at random. What is the expected number of unoccupied squares after 50 bell rings, up to six decimal places?

The debate on X validated is whether or not a Monte Carlo resolution is feasible. Up to six decimals, certainly not. But with some lower precision, certainly. Here is a rather basic R code where the 50 steps are operated on the 900 squares, rather than the 900 fleas. This saves some time by avoiding empty squares.

```xprmt=function(n=10,T=50){

mean=0
for (t in 1:n){

board=rep(1,900)
for (v in 1:T){

beard=rep(0,900)
if (board[1]>0){
poz=c(0,1,0,30)
ne=rmultinom(1,board[1],prob=(poz!=0))
beard[1+poz]=beard[1+poz]+ne}
#
for (i in (2:899)[board[-1][-899]>0]){
u=(i-1)%%30+1;v=(i-1)%/%30+1
poz=c(-(u>1),(u<30),-30*(v>1),30*(v<30))
ne=rmultinom(1,board[i],prob=(poz!=0))
beard[i+poz]=beard[i+poz]+ne}
#
if (board[900]>0){
poz=c(-1,0,-30,0)
ne=rmultinom(1,board[900],prob=(poz!=0))
beard[900+poz]=beard[900+poz]+ne}
board=beard}
mean=mean+sum(board==0)}
return(mean/n)}
```

The function returns an empirical average over n replications. With a presumably awkward approach to the borderline squares, since it involves adding zeros to keep the structure the same… Nonetheless, it produces an approximation that is rather close to the approximate expected value, in about 3mn on my laptop.

```> exprmt(n=1e3)
[1] 331.082
> 900/exp(1)
[1] 331.0915
```

Further gains follow from considering only half of the squares, as there are two independent processes acting in parallel. I looked at an alternative and much faster approach using the stationary distribution, with the stationary being the Multinomial (450,(2/1740,3/1740…,4/1740,…,2/1740)) with probabilities proportional to 2 in the corner, 3 on the sides, and 4 in the inside. (The process, strictly speaking, has no stationary distribution, since it is periodic. But one can consider instead the subprocess indexed by even times.) This seems to be the case, though, when looking at the occupancy frequencies, after defining the stationary as:

```inva=function(B=30){
return(c(2,rep(3,B-2),2,rep(c(3,
rep(4,B-2),3),B-2),2,rep(3,B-2),2))}
```

namely

```> mn=0;n=1e8 #14 clock hours!
> proz=rep(c(rep(c(0,1),15),rep(c(1,0),15)),15)*inva(30)
> for (t in 1:n)
+ mn=mn+table(rmultinom(1,450,prob=rep(1,450)))[1:4]
> mn=mn/n
> mn[1]=mn[1]-450
> mn
0      1      2     3
166.11 164.92  82.56 27.71
> exprmt(n=1e6) #55 clock hours!!
[1] 165.36 165.69 82.92 27.57```

my original confusion being that the Poisson approximation had not yet taken over… (Of course, computing the first frequency for the stationary distribution does not require any simulation, since it is the sum of the complement probabilities to the power 450, i.e., 166.1069.)

## debunking a (minor and personal) myth

Posted in Books, Kids, R, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , on September 9, 2015 by xi'an

For quite a while, I entertained the idea that Beta and Dirichlet proposals  were more adequate than (log-)normal random walks proposals for parameters on (0,1) and simplicia (simplices, simplexes), respectively, when running an MCMC. For instance, for p in (0,1) the value of the Markov chain at time t-1, the proposal at time t could be a Be(εp,ε{1-p}) generator, since its mean is equal to p and its variance is proportional to 1/(1+ε). (Although I cannot find track of this notion in my books.) The parameter ε can be calibrated towards a given acceptance rate, like the golden number 0.234 of Gelman, Gilks and Roberts (1996). However, when using this proposal on a mixture model, Kaniav Kamari and myself realised today that there is a catch, namely that pushing ε down to achieve an acceptance rate near 0.234 may end up in disaster, since the parameters of the Beta or of the Dirichlet may become lower than 1, which implies an infinite explosion on some boundaries of the parameter space. An explosion that gets more and more serious as ε decreases to zero. Hence is more and more likely to decrease the acceptance rate, thus to reduce ε, which in turns concentrates even more the support on the boundary and leads to a vicious circle and no convergence to the target acceptance rate… Continue reading