## arXiv frenzy

Posted in R, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , on June 23, 2015 by xi'an

In the few past days, there has been so many arXiv postings of interest—presumably the NIPS submission effect!—that I cannot hope to cover them in the coming weeks! Hopefully, some will still come out on the ‘Og in a near future:

• Scalable Approximations of Marginal Posteriors in Variable Selection by Willem van den Boom, Galen Reeves, David B. Dunson
• The MCMC split sampler: A block Gibbs sampling scheme for latent Gaussian models by Óli Páll Geirsson, Birgir Hrafnkelsson, Daniel Simpson, Helgi Sigurðarson [also deserves a special mention for gathering only ***son authors!]
• Bayesian Nonparametric Modeling of Higher Order Markov Chains by Abhra Sarkar, David B. Dunson
• Convergence of Sequential Quasi-Monte Carlo Smoothing Algorithms by Mathieu Gerber, Nicolas Chopin
• Robust Bayesian inference via coarsening by Jeffrey W. Miller, David B. Dunson
• Expectation Particle Belief Propagation by Thibaut Lienart, Yee Whye Teh, Arnaud Doucet
• arXiv:1506.05860: Variational Gaussian Copula Inference by Shaobo Han, Xuejun Liao, David B. Dunson, Lawrence Carin
• arXiv:1506.05855: The Frequentist Information Criterion (FIC): The unification of information-based and frequentist inference by Colin H. LaMont, Paul A. Wiggins
• arXiv:1506.05757: Bayesian Inference for the Multivariate Extended-Skew Normal Distribution by Mathieu Gerber, Florian Pelgrin
• arXiv:1506.05741: Accelerated dimension-independent adaptive Metropolis by Yuxin Chen, David Keyes, Kody J.H. Law, Hatem Ltaief
• arXiv:1506.05269: Bayesian Survival Model based on Moment Characterization by Julyan Arbel, Antonio Lijoi, Bernardo Nipoti
• arXiv:1506.04778: Fast sampling with Gaussian scale-mixture priors in high-dimensional regression by Anirban Bhattacharya, Antik Chakraborty, Bani K. Mallick
• arXiv:1506.04416: Bayesian Dark Knowledge by Anoop Korattikara, Vivek Rathod, Kevin Murphy, Max Welling [a special mention for this title!]
• arXiv:1506.03693: Optimization Monte Carlo: Efficient and Embarrassingly Parallel Likelihood-Free Inference by Edward Meeds, Max Welling
• arXiv:1506.03074: Variational consensus Monte Carlo by Maxim Rabinovich, Elaine Angelino, Michael I. Jordan
• arXiv:1506.02564: Gradient-free Hamiltonian Monte Carlo with Efficient Kernel Exponential Families by Heiko Strathmann, Dino Sejdinovic, Samuel Livingstone, Zoltan Szabo, Arthur Gretton [comments coming soon!]

## ABC for big data

Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , on June 23, 2015 by xi'an

“The results in this paper suggest that ABC can scale to large data, at least for models with a xed number of parameters, under the assumption that the summary statistics obey a central limit theorem.”

In a week rich with arXiv submissions about MCMC and “big data”, like the Variational consensus Monte Carlo of Rabinovich et al., or scalable Bayesian inference via particle mirror descent by Dai et al., Wentao Li and Paul Fearnhead contributed an impressive paper entitled Behaviour of ABC for big data. However, a word of warning: the title is somewhat misleading in that the paper does not address the issue of big or tall data per se, e.g., the impossibility to handle the whole data at once and to reproduce it by simulation, but rather the asymptotics of ABC. The setting is not dissimilar to the earlier Fearnhead and Prangle (2012) Read Paper. The central theme of this theoretical paper [with 24 pages of proofs!] is to study the connection between the number N of Monte Carlo simulations and the tolerance value ε when the number of observations n goes to infinity. A main result in the paper is that the ABC posterior mean can have the same asymptotic distribution as the MLE when ε=o(n-1/4). This is however in opposition with of no direct use in practice as the second main result that the Monte Carlo variance is well-controlled only when ε=O(n-1/2).

Something I have (slight) trouble with is the construction of an importance sampling function of the fABC(s|θ)α when, obviously, this function cannot be used for simulation purposes. The authors point out this fact, but still build an argument about the optimal choice of α, namely away from 0 and 1, like ½. Actually, any value different from 0,1, is sensible, meaning that the range of acceptable importance functions is wide. Most interestingly (!), the paper constructs an iterative importance sampling ABC in a spirit similar to Beaumont et al. (2009) ABC-PMC. Even more interestingly, the ½ factor amounts to updating the scale of the proposal as twice the scale of the target, just as in PMC.

Another aspect of the analysis I do not catch is the reason for keeping the Monte Carlo sample size to a fixed value N, while setting a sequence of acceptance probabilities (or of tolerances) along iterations. This is a very surprising result in that the Monte Carlo error does remain under control and does not dominate the overall error!

“Whilst our theoretical results suggest that point estimates based on the ABC posterior have good properties, they do not suggest that the ABC posterior is a good approximation to the true posterior, nor that the ABC posterior will accurately quantify the uncertainty in estimates.”

Overall, this is clearly a paper worth reading for understanding the convergence issues related with ABC. With more theoretical support than the earlier Fearnhead and Prangle (2012). However, it does not provide guidance into the construction of a sequence of Monte Carlo samples nor does it discuss the selection of the summary statistic, which has obviously a major impact on the efficiency of the estimation. And to relate to the earlier warning, it does not cope with “big data” in that it reproduces the original simulation of the n sized sample.

## Hamming Ball Sampler

Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , on May 7, 2015 by xi'an

Michalis Titsias and Christopher Yau just arXived a paper entitled the Hamming Ball sampler. Aimed at large and complex discrete latent variable models. The completion method is called after Richard Hamming, who is associated with code correcting methods (reminding me of one of the Master courses I took on coding, 30 years ago…), because it uses the Hamming distance in a discrete version of the slice sampler. One of the reasons for this proposal is that conditioning upon the auxiliary slice variable allows for the derivation of normalisation constants otherwise unavailable. The method still needs some calibration in the choice of blocks that partition the auxiliary variable and in the size of the ball. One of the examples assessed in the paper is a variable selection problem with 1200 covariates, out of which only 2 are relevant, while another example deals with a factorial HMM, involving 10 hidden chains. Since the paper compares each example with the corresponding block Gibbs sampling solution, it means this Gibbs sampling version is not intractable. It would be interesting to see a case where the alternative is not available…

## the most patronizing start to an answer I have ever received

Posted in Books, Kids, R, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , on April 30, 2015 by xi'an

Another occurrence [out of many!] of a question on X validated where the originator (primitivus petitor) was trying to get an explanation without the proper background. On either Bayesian statistics or simulation. The introductory sentence to the question was about “trying to understand how the choice of priors affects a Bayesian model estimated using MCMC” but the bulk of the question was in fact failing to understand an R code for a random-walk Metropolis-Hastings algorithm for a simple regression model provided in a introductory blog by Florian Hartig. And even more precisely about confusing the R code dnorm(b, sd = 5, log = T) in the prior with rnorm(1,mean=b, sd = 5, log = T) in the proposal…

“You should definitely invest some time in learning the bases of Bayesian statistics and MCMC methods from textbooks or on-line courses.” X

So I started my answer with the above warning. Which sums up my feelings about many of those X validated questions, namely that primitivi petitores lack the most basic background to consider such questions. Obviously, I should not have bothered with an answer, but it was late at night after a long day, a good meal at the pub in Kenilworth, and a broken toe still bothering me. So I got this reply from the primitivus petitor that it was a patronizing piece of advice and he prefers to learn from R code than from textbooks and on-line courses, having “looked through a number of textbooks”. Good luck with this endeavour then!

## mixtures of mixtures

Posted in pictures, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , on March 9, 2015 by xi'an

And yet another arXival of a paper on mixtures! This one is written by Gertraud Malsiner-Walli, Sylvia Frühwirth-Schnatter, and Bettina Grün, from the Johannes Kepler University Linz and the Wirtschaftsuniversitat Wien I visited last September. With the exact title being Identifying mixtures of mixtures using Bayesian estimation.

So, what is a mixture of mixtures if not a mixture?! Or if not only a mixture. The upper mixture level is associated with clusters, while the lower mixture level is used for modelling the distribution of a given cluster. Because the cluster needs to be real enough, the components of the mixture are assumed to be heavily overlapping. The paper thus spends a large amount of space on detailing the construction of the associated hierarchical prior. Which in particular implies defining through the prior what a cluster means. The paper also connects with the overfitting mixture idea of Rousseau and Mengersen (2011, Series B). At the cluster level, the Dirichlet hyperparameter is chosen to be very small, 0.001, which empties superfluous clusters but sounds rather arbitrary (which is the reason why we did not go for such small values in our testing/mixture modelling). On the opposite, the mixture weights have an hyperparameter staying (far) away from zero. The MCMC implementation is based on a standard Gibbs sampler and the outcome is analysed and sorted by estimating the “true” number of clusters as the MAP and by selecting MCMC simulations conditional on that value. From there clusters are identified via the point process representation of a mixture posterior. Using a standard k-means algorithm.

The remainder of the paper illustrates the approach on simulated and real datasets. Recovering in those small dimension setups the number of clusters used in the simulation or found in other studies. As noted in the conclusion, using solely a Gibbs sampler with such a large number of components is rather perilous since it may get stuck close to suboptimal configurations. Especially with very small Dirichlet hyperparameters.

## Unbiased Bayes for Big Data: Path of partial posteriors [a reply from the authors]

Posted in Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , on February 27, 2015 by xi'an

[Here is a reply by Heiko Strathmann to my post of yesterday. Along with the slides of a talk in Oxford mentioned in the discussion.]

Thanks for putting this up, and thanks for the discussion. Christian, as already exchanged via email, here are some answers to the points you make.

First of all, we don’t claim a free lunch — and are honest with the limitations of the method (see negative examples). Rather, we make the point that we can achieve computational savings in certain situations — essentially exploiting redundancy (what Michael called “tall” data in his note on subsampling & HMC) leading to fast convergence of posterior statistics.

Dan is of course correct noticing that if the posterior statistic does not converge nicely (i.e. all data counts), then truncation time is “mammoth”. It is also correct that it might be questionable to aim for an unbiased Bayesian method in the presence of such redundancies. However, these are the two extreme perspectives on the topic. The message that we want to get along is that there is a trade-off in between these extremes. In particular the GP examples illustrate this nicely as we are able to reduce MSE in a regime where posterior statistics have *not* yet stabilised, see e.g. figure 6.

“And the following paragraph is further confusing me as it seems to imply that convergence is not that important thanks to the de-biasing equation.”

To clarify, the paragraph refers to the additional convergence issues induced by alternative Markov transition kernels of mini-batch-based full posterior sampling methods by Welling, Bardenet, Dougal & co. For example, Firefly MC’s mixing time is increased by a factor of 1/q where q*N is the mini-batch size. Mixing of stochastic gradient Langevin gets worse over time. This is not true for our scheme as we can use standard transition kernels. It is still essential for the partial posterior Markov chains to converge (if MCMC is used). However, as this is a well studied problem, we omit the topic in our paper and refer to standard tools for diagnosis. All this is independent of the debiasing device.

Yesterday in Oxford, Pierre Jacob pointed out that if MCMC is used for estimating partial posterior statistics, the overall result is not unbiased. We had a nice discussion how this bias could be addressed via a two-stage debiasing procedure: debiasing the MC estimates as described in the “Unbiased Monte Carlo” paper by Agapiou et al, and then plugging those into the path estimators — though it is (yet) not so clear how (and whether) this would work in our case.
In the current version of the paper, we do not address the bias present due to MCMC. We have a paragraph on this in section 3.2. Rather, we start from a premise that full posterior MCMC samples are a gold standard. Furthermore, the framework we study is not necessarily linked to MCMC – it could be that the posterior expectation is available in closed form, but simply costly in N. In this case, we can still unbiasedly estimate this posterior expectation – see GP regression.

“The choice of the tail rate is thus quite delicate to validate against the variance constraints (2) and (3).”

It is true that the choice is crucial in order to control the variance. However, provided that partial posterior expectations converge at a rate n with n the size of a minibatch, computational complexity can be reduced to N1-α (α<β) without variance exploding. There is a trade-off: the faster the posterior expectations converge, more computation can be saved; β is in general unknown, but can be roughly estimated with the “direct approach” as we describe in appendix.

It is true that for certain classes of models and φ functionals, the direct averaging of expectations for increasing data sizes yields good results (see log-normal example), and we state this. However, the GP regression experiments show that the direct averaging gives a larger MSE as with debiasing applied. This is exactly the trade-off mentioned earlier.

I also wonder what people think about the comparison to stochastic variational inference (GP for Big Data), as this hasn’t appeared in discussions yet. It is the comparison to “non-unbiased” schemes that Christian and Dan asked for.

## Unbiased Bayes for Big Data: Path of partial posteriors

Posted in Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , on February 26, 2015 by xi'an

“Data complexity is sub-linear in N, no bias is introduced, variance is finite.”

Heiko Strathman, Dino Sejdinovic and Mark Girolami have arXived a few weeks ago a paper on the use of a telescoping estimator to achieve an unbiased estimator of a Bayes estimator relying on the entire dataset, while using only a small proportion of the dataset. The idea is that a sequence  converging—to an unbiased estimator—of estimators φt can be turned into an unbiased estimator by a stopping rule T:

$\sum_{t=1}^T \dfrac{\varphi_t-\varphi_{t-1}}{\mathbb{P}(T\ge t)}$

is indeed unbiased. In a “Big Data” framework, the components φt are MCMC versions of posterior expectations based on a proportion αt of the data. And the stopping rule cannot exceed αt=1. The authors further propose to replicate this unbiased estimator R times on R parallel processors. They further claim a reduction in the computing cost of

$\mathcal{O}(N^{1-\alpha})\qquad\text{if}\qquad\mathbb{P}(T=t)\approx e^{-\alpha t}$

which means that a sub-linear cost can be achieved. However, the gain in computing time means higher variance than for the full MCMC solution:

“It is clear that running an MCMC chain on the full posterior, for any statistic, produces more accurate estimates than the debiasing approach, which by construction has an additional intrinsic source of variance. This means that if it is possible to produce even only a single MCMC sample (…), the resulting posterior expectation can be estimated with less expected error. It is therefore not instructive to compare approaches in that region. “

I first got a “free lunch” impression when reading the paper, namely it sounded like using a random stopping rule was enough to overcome unbiasedness and large size jams. This is not the message of the paper, but I remain both intrigued by the possibilities the unbiasedness offers and bemused by the claims therein, for several reasons: Continue reading