## IMS workshop [day 4]

Posted in pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , on August 31, 2018 by xi'an

While I did not repeat the mistake of yesterday morning, just as well because the sun was unbearably strong!, I managed this time to board a bus headed in the wrong direction and as a result went through several remote NUS campi! Missing the first talk of the day as a result. By Youssef Marzouk, with a connection between sequential Monte Carlo and optimal transport. Transport for sampling, that is. The following talk by Tiangang Cui was however related, with Marzouk a co-author, as it aimed at finding linear transforms towards creating Normal approximations to the target to be used as proposals in Metropolis algorithms. Which may sound like something already tried a zillion times in the MCMC literature, except that the setting was rather specific to some inverse problems, imposing a generalised Normal structure on the transform, then optimised by transport arguments. It is unclear to me [from just attending the talk] how complex this derivation is and how dimension steps in, but the produced illustrations were quite robust to an increase in dimension.

The remaining talks for the day were mostly particular, from Anthony Lee introducing a new and almost costless way of producing variance estimates in particle filters, exploiting only the ancestry of particles, to Mike Pitt discussing the correlated pseudo-marginal algorithm developed with George Deligiannidis and Arnaud Doucet. Which somewhat paradoxically managed to fight the degeneracy [i.e., the need for a number of terms increasing like the time index T] found in independent pseudo-marginal resolutions, moving down to almost log(T)… With an interesting connection to the quasi SMC approach of Mathieu and Nicolas. And Sebastian Reich also stressed the links with optimal transport in a talk about data assimilation that was way beyond my reach. The day concluded with fireworks, through a magistral lecture by Professeur Del Moral on a continuous time version of PMCMC using the Feynman-Kac terminology. Pierre did a superb job during his lecture towards leading the whole room to the conclusion.

## unbiased consistent nested sampling via sequential Monte Carlo [a reply]

Posted in pictures, Statistics, Travel with tags , , , , , , , , on June 13, 2018 by xi'an

Rob Salomone sent me the following reply on my comments of yesterday about their recently arXived paper.

Our main goal in the paper was to show that Nested Sampling (when interpreted a certain way) is really just a member of a larger class of SMC algorithms, and exploring the consequences of that. We should point out that the section regarding calibration applies generally to SMC samplers, and hope that people give those techniques a try regardless of their chosen SMC approach.
Regarding your question about “whether or not it makes more sense to get completely SMC and forego any nested sampling flavour!”, this is an interesting point. After all, if Nested Sampling is just a special form of SMC, why not just use more standard SMC approaches? It seems that the Nested Sampling’s main advantage is its ability to cope with problems that have “phase transition’’ like behaviour, and thus is robust to a wider range of difficult problems than annealing approaches. Nevertheless, we hope this way of looking at NS (and showing that there may be variations of SMC with certain advantages) leads to improved NS and SMC methods down the line.
Regarding your post, I should clarify a point regarding unbiasedness. The largest likelihood bound is actually set to infinity. Thus, for the fixed version of NS—SMC, one has an unbiased estimator of the “final” band. Choosing a final band prematurely will of course result in very high variance. However, the estimator is unbiased. For example, consider NS—SMC with only one strata. Then, the method reduces to simply using the prior as an importance sampling distribution for the posterior (unbiased, but often high variance).
“Which never occurred as the number one difficulty there, as the simplest implementation runs a Markov chain from the last removed entry, independently from the remaining entries. Even stationarity is not an issue since I believe that the first occurrence within the level set is distributed from the constrained prior.”
This is an interesting point that we had not considered! In practice, and in many papers that apply Nested Sampling with MCMC, the common approach is to start the MCMC at one of the randomly selected “live points”, so the discussion related to independence was in regard to these common implementations.
Regarding starting the chain from outside of the level set. This is likely not done in practice as it introduces an additional difficulty of needing to propose a sample inside the required region (Metropolis–Hastings will have non—zero probability of returning a sample that is still outside the constrained region for any fixed number of iterations). Forcing the continuation of MCMC until a valid point is proposed I believe will be a subtle violation of detailed balance. Of course, the bias of such a modification may be small in practice, but it is an additional awkwardness introduced by the requirement of sample independence!
“And then, in a twist that is not clearly explained in the paper, the focus moves to an improved nested sampler that moves one likelihood value at a time, with a particle step replacing a single  particle. (Things get complicated when several particles may take the very same likelihood value, but randomisation helps.) At this stage the algorithm is quite similar to the original nested sampler. Except for the unbiased estimation of the constants, the  final constant, and the replacement of exponential weights exp(-t/N) by powers of (N-1/N)”
Thanks for pointing out that this isn’t clear, we will try to do better in the next revision! The goal of this part of the paper wasn’t necessarily to propose a new version of nested sampling. Our focus here was to demonstrate that NS–SMC is not simply the Nested Sampling idea with an SMC twist, but that the original NS algorithm with MCMC (and restarting the MCMC sampling at one of the “live points’” as people do in practice) actually is a special case of SMC (with the weights replaced with a suboptimal choice).
The most curious thing is that, as you note, the estimates of remaining prior mass in the SMC context come out as powers of (N-1)/N and not exp(-t/N). In the paper by Walter (2017), he shows that the former choice is actually superior in terms of bias and variance. It was a nice touch that the superior choice of weights came out naturally in the SMC interpretation!
That said, as the fixed version of NS-SMC is the one with the unbiasedness and consistency properties, this was the version we used in the main statistical examples.

## unbiased consistent nested sampling via sequential Monte Carlo

Posted in pictures, Statistics, Travel with tags , , , , , , , , on June 12, 2018 by xi'an

“Moreover, estimates of the marginal likelihood are unbiased.” (p.2)

Rob Salomone, Leah South, Chris Drovandi and Dirk Kroese (from QUT and UQ, Brisbane) recently arXived a paper that frames the nested sampling in such a way that marginal likelihoods can be unbiasedly (and consistently) estimated.

“Why isn’t nested sampling more popular with statisticians?” (p.7)

A most interesting question, especially given its popularity in cosmology and other branches of physics. A first drawback pointed out in the c is the requirement of independence between the elements of the sample produced at each iteration. Which never occurred as the number one difficulty there, as the simplest implementation runs a Markov chain from the last removed entry, independently from the remaining entries. Even stationarity is not an issue since I believe that the first occurrence within the level set is distributed from the constrained prior.

A second difficulty is the use of quadrature which turns integrand into step functions at random slices. Indeed, mixing Monte Carlo with numerical integration makes life much harder, as shown by the early avatars of nested sampling that only accounted for the numerical errors. (And which caused Nicolas and I to write our critical paper in Biometrika.) There are few studies of that kind in the literature, the only one I can think of being [my former PhD student] Anne Philippe‘s thesis twenty years ago.

The third issue stands with the difficulty in parallelising the method. Except by jumping k points at once, rather than going one level at a time. While I agree this makes life more complicated, I am also unsure about the severity of that issue as k nested sampling algorithms can be run in parallel and aggregated in the end, from simple averaging to something more elaborate.

The final blemish is that the nested sampling estimator has a stopping mechanism that induces a truncation error, again maybe a lesser problem given the overall difficulty in assessing the total error.

The paper takes advantage of the ability of SMC to produce unbiased estimates of a sequence of normalising constants (or of the normalising constants of a sequence of targets). For nested sampling, the sequence is made of the prior distribution restricted to an embedded sequence of level sets. With another sequence restricted to bands (likelihood between two likelihood boundaries). If all restricted posteriors of the second kind and their normalising constant are known, the full posterior is known. Apparently up to the main normalising constant, i.e. the marginal likelihood., , except that it is also the sum of all normalising constants. Handling this sequence by SMC addresses the four concerns of the four authors, apart from the truncation issue, since the largest likelihood bound need be set for running the algorithm.

When the sequence of likelihood bounds is chosen based on the observed likelihoods so far, the method becomes adaptive. Requiring again the choice of a stopping rule that may induce bias if stopping occurs too early. And then, in a twist that is not clearly explained in the paper, the focus moves to an improved nested sampler that moves one likelihood value at a time, with a particle step replacing a single particle. (Things get complicated when several particles may take the very same likelihood value, but randomisation helps.) At this stage the algorithm is quite similar to the original nested sampler. Except for the unbiased estimation of the constants, the final constant, and the replacement of exponential weights exp(-t/N) by powers of (N-1/N).

The remainder of this long paper (61 pages!) is dedicated to practical implementation, calibration and running a series of comparisons. A nice final touch is the thanks to the ‘Og for its series of posts on nested sampling, which “helped influence this work, and played a large part in inspiring it.”

In conclusion, this paper is certainly a worthy exploration of the nested sampler, providing further arguments towards a consistent version, with first and foremost an (almost?) unbiased resolution. The comparison with a wide range of alternatives remains open, in particular time-wise, if evidence is the sole target of the simulation. For instance, the choice of this sequence of targets in an SMC may be improved by another sequence, since changing one particle at a time does not sound efficient. The complexity of the implementation and in particular of the simulation from the prior under more and more stringent constraints need to be addressed.

## MCMC with multiple tries

Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , on April 5, 2018 by xi'an

Earlier this year, Luca Martino wrote and arXived a review on multiple try MCMC. As its name suggests, the starting point of this algorithm is to propose N potential moves simultaneously instead of one, possibly according to N different proposal (conditional) densities, and to select one by a normalised importance sampling weight. The move is accepted by a Metropolis-Hastings step based on the ratio of the normalisation constants [at the current and at the one-before-current stages]. Besides the cost of computing the summation and generating the different variates, this method also faces the drawback of requiring N-1 supplementary simulations that are only used for achieving detailed balance and computing a backward summation of importance weights. (A first section of the review is dedicated to independent Metropolis-Hastings proposals, q(θ), which make life simpler, but are less realistic in my opinion since some prior knowledge or experimentation is necessary to build a relevant distribution q(θ).) An alternative covered in the survey is ensemble Monte Carlo (Neal, 2011), which produces a whole sample at each iteration, with target the product of the initial targets. This reminded me of our pinball sampler, which aimed at producing a spread-out sample while keeping the marginal correct. Although the motivation sounds closer to a particle sampler. Especially with this associated notion of an empirical approximation of the target. The next part of the review is about delayed rejection, which is a natural alternative approach to speeding up MCMC by considering several possibilities, if sequentially. Started in Antonietta Mira‘s 1999 PhD thesis. The difficulty with this approach is that the acceptance probability gets increasingly complex as the number of delays grows, which may annihilate its appeal relative to simultaneous multiple tries.

## stability of noisy Metropolis-Hastings

Posted in Statistics with tags , , , , , , on September 28, 2016 by xi'an

Felipe Medina-Aguayo, Antony Lee and Gareth Roberts (all at Warwick University) have recently published—even though the paper was accepted a year ago—a paper in Statistics and Computing about a variant to the pseudo-marginal Metropolis-Hastings algorithm. The modification is to simulate an estimate of the likelihood or posterior at the current value of the Markov chain at every iteration, rather than reproducing the current estimate. The reason for this refreshment of the weight estimate is to prevent stickiness in the chain, when a random weight leads to a very high value of the posterior. Unfortunately, this change leads to a Markov chain with the wrong stationary distribution. When this stationary exists! The paper actually produces examples of transient noisy chains, even in simple cases such as a geometric target distribution. And even when taking the average of a large number of weights. But the paper also contains sufficient conditions, like negative weight moments or uniform ergodicity of the proposal, for the noisy chain to be geometrically ergodic. Even though the applicability of those conditions to complex targets is not always obvious.

## multilevel Monte Carlo for estimating constants

Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , on March 18, 2016 by xi'an

Pierre Del Moral, Ajay Jasra, Kody Law, and Yan Zhou just arXived a paper entitled Sequential Monte Carlo samplers for normalizing constants. Which obviously attracted my interest! The context is one of a sequential Monte Carlo problem, with an associated sequence of targets and of attached normalising constants. While the quantity of interest only relates to the final distribution in the sequence, using Mike Giles‘ multilevel Monte Carlo approach allows for a more accurate estimation and recycling all the past particles, thanks to the telescoping formula. And the sequential representation also allows for an unbiased estimator, as is well known in the sequential Monte Carlo literature. The paper derives accurate bounds on both the variances of two normalisation constant estimators and the costs of producing such estimators (assuming there is an index typo in Corollary 3.1, where L-2 should be L-1). The improvement when compared with traditional SMC is clear on the example contained in the paper. As I read the paper rather quickly and without much attention to the notations, I may have missed the point, but I did not see any conclusion on the choice of the particle population size at each iteration of the SMC. After asking Ajay about it, he pointed out that this size can be derived as

$N_k=\epsilon^{-2}Lh_k^{(\beta+\zeta)/2}K_L$

(with notations taken from the paper).

## at CIRM [#3]

Posted in Kids, Mountains, pictures, Running, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 4, 2016 by xi'an

Simon Barthelmé gave his mini-course on EP, with loads of details on the implementation of the method. Focussing on the EP-ABC and MCMC-EP versions today. Leaving open the difficulty of assessing to which limit EP is converging. But mentioning the potential for asynchronous EP (on which I would like to hear more). Ironically using several times a logistic regression example, if not on the Pima Indians benchmark! He also talked about approximate EP solutions that relate to consensus MCMC. With a connection to Mark Beaumont’s talk at NIPS [at the time as mine!] on the comparison with ABC. While we saw several talks on EP during this week, I am still agnostic about the potential of the approach. It certainly produces a fast proxy to the true posterior and hence can be exploited ad nauseam in inference methods based on pseudo-models like indirect inference. In conjunction with other quick and dirty approximations when available. As in ABC, it would be most useful to know how far from the (ideal) posterior distribution does the approximation stands. Machine learning approaches presumably allow for an evaluation of the predictive performances, but less so for the modelling accuracy, even with new sampling steps. [But I know nothing, I know!]

Dennis Prangle presented some on-going research on high dimension [data] ABC. Raising the question of what is the true meaning of dimension in ABC algorithms. Or of sample size. Because the inference relies on the event d(s(y),s(y’))≤ξ or on the likelihood l(θ|x). Both one-dimensional. Mentioning Iain Murray’s talk at NIPS [that I also missed]. Re-expressing as well the perspective that ABC can be seen as a missing or estimated normalising constant problem as in Bornn et al. (2015) I discussed earlier. The central idea is to use SMC to simulate a particle cloud evolving as the target tolerance ξ decreases. Which supposes a latent variable structure lurking in the background.

Judith Rousseau gave her talk on non-parametric mixtures and the possibility to learn parametrically about the component weights. Starting with a rather “magic” result by Allman et al. (2009) that three repeated observations per individual, all terms in a mixture are identifiable. Maybe related to that simpler fact that mixtures of Bernoullis are not identifiable while mixtures of Binomial are identifiable, even when n=2. As “shown” in this plot made for X validated. Actually truly related because Allman et al. (2009) prove identifiability through a finite dimensional model. (I am surprised I missed this most interesting paper!) With the side condition that a mixture of p components made of r Bernoulli products is identifiable when p ≥ 2[log² r] +1, when log² is base 2-logarithm. And [x] the upper rounding. I also find most relevant this distinction between the weights and the remainder of the mixture as weights behave quite differently, hardly parameters in a sense.