WBIC, practically

“Thus far, WBIC has received no more than a cursory mention by Gelman et al. (2013)”

I had missed this 2015  paper by Nial Friel and co-authors on a practical investigation of Watanabe’s WBIC. Where WBIC stands for widely applicable Bayesian information criterion. The thermodynamic integration approach explored by Nial and some co-authors for the approximation of the evidence, thermodynamic integration that produces the log-evidence as an integral between temperatures t=0 and t=1 of a powered evidence, is eminently suited for WBIC, as the widely applicable Bayesian information criterion is associated with the specific temperature t⁰ that makes the power posterior equidistant, Kullback-Leibler-wise, from the prior and posterior distributions. And the expectation of the log-likelihood under this very power posterior equal to the (genuine) evidence. In fact, WBIC is often associated with the sub-optimal temperature 1/log(n), where n is the (effective?) sample size. (By comparison, if my minimalist description is unclear!, thermodynamic integration requires a whole range of temperatures and associated MCMC runs.) In an ideal Gaussian setting, WBIC improves considerably over thermodynamic integration, the larger the sample the better. In more realistic settings, though, including a simple regression and a logistic [Pima Indians!] model comparison, thermodynamic integration may do better for a given computational cost although the paper is unclear about these costs. The paper also runs a comparison with harmonic mean and nested sampling approximations. Since the integral of interest involves a power of the likelihood, I wonder if a safe version of the harmonic mean resolution can be derived from simulations of the genuine posterior. Provided the exact temperature t⁰ is known…

Greek variations on power-expected-posterior priors

Dimitris Fouskakis, Ioannis Ntzoufras and Konstantinos Perrakis, from Athens, have just arXived a paper on power-expected-posterior priors. Just like the power prior and the expected-posterior prior, this approach aims at avoiding improper priors by the use of imaginary data, which distribution is itself the marginal against another prior. (In the papers I wrote on that topic with Juan Antonio Cano and Diego Salmerón, we used MCMC to figure out a fixed point for such priors.)

The current paper (which I only perused) studies properties of two versions of power-expected-posterior priors proposed in an earlier paper by the same authors. For the normal linear model. Using a posterior derived from an unormalised powered likelihood either (DR) integrated in the imaginary data against the prior predictive distribution of the reference model based on the powered likelihood, or (CR) integrated in the imaginary data against the prior predictive distribution of the reference model based on the actual likelihood. The baseline model being the G-prior with g=n². Both versions lead to a marginal likelihood that is similar to BIC and hence consistent. The DR version coincides with the original power-expected-posterior prior in the linear case. The CR version involves a change of covariance matrix. All in all, the CR version tends to favour less complex models, but is less parsimonious as a variable selection tool, which sounds a wee bit contradictory. Overall, I thus feel (possibly incorrectly) that the paper is more an appendix to the earlier paper than a paper in itself as I do not get in the end a clear impression of which method should be preferred.

estimating constants [impression soleil levant]

The CRiSM workshop on estimating constants which took place here in Warwick from April 20 till April 22 was quite enjoyable [says most objectively one of the organisers!], with all speakers present to deliver their talks  (!) and around sixty participants, including 17 posters. It remains a exciting aspect of the field that so many and so different perspectives are available on the “doubly intractable” problem of estimating a normalising constant. Several talks and posters concentrated on Ising models, which always sound a bit artificial to me, but also are perfect testing grounds for approximations to classical algorithms.

On top of [clearly interesting!] talks associated with papers I had already read [and commented here], I had not previously heard about Pierre Jacob’s coupling SMC sequence, which paper is not yet out [no spoiler then!]. Or about Michael Betancourt’s adiabatic Monte Carlo and its connection with the normalising constant. Nicolas Chopin talked about the unnormalised Poisson process I discussed a while ago, with this feature that the normalising constant itself becomes an additional parameter. And that integration can be replaced with (likelihood) maximisation. The approach, which is based on a reference distribution (and an artificial logistic regression à la Geyer), reminded me of bridge sampling. And indirectly of path sampling, esp. when Merrilee Hurn gave us a very cool introduction to power posteriors in the following talk. Also mentioning the controlled thermodynamic integration of Chris Oates and co-authors I discussed a while ago. (Too bad that Chris Oates could not make it to this workshop!) And also pointing out that thermodynamic integration could be a feasible alternative to nested sampling.

Another novel aspect was found in Yves Atchadé’s talk about sparse high-dimension matrices with priors made of mutually exclusive measures and quasi-likelihood approximations. A simplified version of the talk being in having a non-identified non-constrained matrix later projected onto one of those measure supports. While I was aware of his noise-contrastive estimation of normalising constants, I had not previously heard Michael Gutmann give a talk on that approach (linking to Geyer’s 1994 mythical paper!). And I do remain nonplussed at the possibility of including the normalising constant as an additional parameter [in a computational and statistical sense]..! Both Chris Sherlock and Christophe Andrieu talked about novel aspects on pseudo-marginal techniques, Chris on the lack of variance reduction brought by averaging unbiased estimators of the likelihood and Christophe on the case of large datasets, recovering better performances in latent variable models by estimating the ratio rather than taking a ratio of estimators. (With Christophe pointing out that this was an exceptional case when harmonic mean estimators could be considered!)