An AISTATS 2019 paper was recently arXived by Kelvin Hsu and Fabio Ramos. Proposing an ABC method
“…consisting of (1) a consistent surrogate likelihood model that modularizes queries from simulation calls, (2) a Bayesian learning objective for hyperparameters that improves inference accuracy, and (3) a posterior surrogate density and a super-sampling inference algorithm using its closed-form posterior mean embedding.”
While this sales line sounds rather obscure to me, the authors further defend their approach against ABC-MCMC or synthetic likelihood by the points
“that (1) only one new simulation is required at each new parameter θ and (2) likelihood queries do not need to be at parameters where simulations are available.”
using a RKHS approach to approximate the likelihood or the distribution of the summary (statistic) given the parameter (value) θ. Based on the choice of a certain positive definite kernel. (As usual, I do not understand why RKHS would do better than another non-parametric approach, especially since the approach approximates the full likelihood, but I am not a non-parametrician…)
“The main advantage of using an approximate surrogate likelihood surrogate model is that it readily provides a marginal surrogate likelihood quantity that lends itself to a hyper-parameter learning algorithm”
The tolerance ε (and other cyberparameters) are estimated by maximising the approximated marginal likelihood, which happens to be available in the convenient case the prior is an anisotropic Gaussian distribution. For the simulated data in the reference table? But then missing the need for localising the simulations near the posterior? Inference is then conducting by simulating from this approximation. With the common (to RKHS) drawback that the approximation is “bounded and normalized but potentially non-positive”.