## control functionals for Monte Carlo integration

Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 28, 2016 by xi'an

A paper on control variates by Chris Oates, Mark Girolami (Warwick) and Nicolas Chopin (CREST) appeared in a recent issue of Series B. I had read and discussed the paper with them previously and the following is a set of comments I wrote at some stage, to be taken with enough gains of salt since Chris, Mark and Nicolas answered them either orally or in the paper. Note also that I already discussed an earlier version, with comments that are not necessarily coherent with the following ones! [Thanks to the busy softshop this week, I resorted to publish some older drafts, so mileage can vary in the coming days.]

First, it took me quite a while to get over the paper, mostly because I have never worked with reproducible kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHS) before. I looked at some proofs in the appendix and at the whole paper but could not spot anything amiss. It is obviously a major step to uncover a manageable method with a rate that is lower than √n. When I set my PhD student Anne Philippe on the approach via Riemann sums, we were quickly hindered by the dimension issue and could not find a way out. In the first versions of the nested sampling approach, John Skilling had also thought he could get higher convergence rates before realising the Monte Carlo error had not disappeared and hence was keeping the rate at the same √n speed.

The core proof in the paper leading to the 7/12 convergence rate relies on a mathematical result of Sun and Wu (2009) that a certain rate of regularisation of the function of interest leads to an average variance of order 1/6. I have no reason to mistrust the result (and anyway did not check the original paper), but I am still puzzled by the fact that it almost immediately leads to the control variate estimator having a smaller order variance (or at least variability). On average or in probability. (I am also uncertain on the possibility to interpret the boxplot figures as establishing super-√n speed.)

Another thing I cannot truly grasp is how the control functional estimator of (7) can be both a mere linear recombination of individual unbiased estimators of the target expectation and an improvement in the variance rate. I acknowledge that the coefficients of the matrices are functions of the sample simulated from the target density but still…

Another source of inner puzzlement is the choice of the kernel in the paper, which seems too simple to be able to cover all problems despite being used in every illustration there. I see the kernel as centred at zero, which means a central location must be know, decreasing to zero away from this centre, so possibly missing aspects of the integrand that are too far away, and isotonic in the reference norm, which also seems to preclude some settings where the integrand is not that compatible with the geometry.

I am equally nonplussed by the existence of a deterministic bound on the error, although it is not completely deterministic, depending on the values of the reproducible kernel at the points of the sample. Does it imply anything restrictive on the function to be integrated?

A side remark about the use of intractable in the paper is that, given the development of a whole new branch of computational statistics handling likelihoods that cannot be computed at all, intractable should possibly be reserved for such higher complexity models.

## Conditional love [guest post]

Posted in Books, Kids, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 4, 2015 by xi'an

[When Dan Simpson told me he was reading Terenin’s and Draper’s latest arXival in a nice Bath pub—and not a nice bath tub!—, I asked him for a blog entry and he agreed. Here is his piece, read at your own risk! If you remember to skip the part about Céline Dion, you should enjoy it very much!!!]

Probability has traditionally been described, as per Kolmogorov and his ardent follower Katy Perry, unconditionally. This is, of course, excellent for those of us who really like measure theory, as the maths is identical. Unfortunately mathematical convenience is not necessarily enough and a large part of the applied statistical community is working with Bayesian methods. These are unavoidably conditional and, as such, it is natural to ask if there is a fundamentally conditional basis for probability.

Bruno de Finetti—and later Richard Cox and Edwin Jaynes—considered conditional bases for Bayesian probability that are, unfortunately, incomplete. The critical problem is that they mainly consider finite state spaces and construct finitely additive systems of conditional probability. For a variety of reasons, neither of these restrictions hold much truck in the modern world of statistics.

In a recently arXiv’d paper, Alexander Terenin and David Draper devise a set of axioms that make the Cox-Jaynes system of conditional probability rigorous. Furthermore, they show that the complete set of Kolmogorov axioms (including countable additivity) can be derived as theorems from their axioms by conditioning on the entire sample space.

This is a deep and fundamental paper, which unfortunately means that I most probably do not grasp it’s complexities (especially as, for some reason, I keep reading it in pubs!). However I’m going to have a shot at having some thoughts on it, because I feel like it’s the sort of paper one should have thoughts on. Continue reading

## discussions on Gerber and Chopin

Posted in Books, Kids, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 29, 2015 by xi'an

As a coincidence, I received my copy of JRSS Series B with the Read Paper by Mathieu Gerber and Nicolas Chopin on sequential quasi Monte Carlo just as I was preparing an arXival of a few discussions on the paper! Among the [numerous and diverse] discussions, a few were of particular interest to me [I highlighted members of the University of Warwick and of Université Paris-Dauphine to suggest potential biases!]:

1. Mike Pitt (Warwick), Murray Pollock et al.  (Warwick) and Finke et al. (Warwick) all suggested combining quasi Monte Carlo with pseudomarginal Metropolis-Hastings, pMCMC (Pitt) and Rao-Bklackwellisation (Finke et al.);
2. Arnaud Doucet pointed out that John Skilling had used the Hilbert (ordering) curve in a 2004 paper;
3. Chris Oates, Dan Simpson and Mark Girolami (Warwick) suggested combining quasi Monte Carlo with their functional control variate idea;
4. Richard Everitt wondered about the dimension barrier of d=6 and about possible slice extensions;
5. Zhijian He and Art Owen pointed out simple solutions to handle a random number of uniforms (for simulating each step in sequential Monte Carlo), namely to start with quasi Monte Carlo and end up with regular Monte Carlo, in an hybrid manner;
6. Hans Künsch points out the connection with systematic resampling à la Carpenter, Clifford and Fearnhead (1999) and wonders about separating the impact of quasi Monte Carlo between resampling and propagating [which vaguely links to one of my comments];
7. Pierre L’Ecuyer points out a possible improvement over the Hilbert curve by a preliminary sorting;
8. Frederik Lindsten and Sumeet Singh propose using ABC to extend the backward smoother to intractable cases [but still with a fixed number of uniforms to use at each step], as well as Mateu and Ryder (Paris-Dauphine) for a more general class of intractable models;
9. Omiros Papaspiliopoulos wonders at the possibility of a quasi Markov chain with “low discrepancy paths”;
10. Daniel Rudolf suggest linking the error rate of sequential quasi Monte Carlo with the bounds of Vapnik and Ĉervonenkis (1977).

The arXiv document also includes the discussions by Julyan Arbel and Igor Prünster (Turino) on the Bayesian nonparametric side of sqMC and by Robin Ryder (Dauphine) on the potential of sqMC for ABC.

## Relevant statistics for Bayesian model choice [hot off the press!]

Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , on October 30, 2014 by xi'an

Our paper about evaluating statistics used for ABC model choice has just appeared in Series B! It somewhat paradoxical that it comes out just a few days after we submitted our paper on using random forests for Bayesian model choice, thus bypassing the need for selecting those summary statistics by incorporating all statistics available and letting the trees automatically rank those statistics in term of their discriminating power. Nonetheless, this paper remains an exciting piece of work (!) as it addresses the more general and pressing question of the validity of running a Bayesian analysis with only part of the information contained in the data. Quite usefull in my (biased) opinion when considering the emergence of approximate inference already discussed on this ‘Og…

[As a trivial aside, I had first used fresh from the press(es) as the bracketted comment, before I realised the meaning was not necessarily the same in English and in French.]

## Series B reaches 5.721 impact factor!

Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags , , , on September 15, 2014 by xi'an

I received this email from Wiley with the great figure that JRSS Series B has now reached a 5.721 impact factor. Which makes it the first journal in Statistics from this perspective. Congrats to editors Gareth Roberts, Piotr Fryzlewicz and Ingrid Van Keilegom for this achievement! An amazing jump from the 2009 figure of 2.84…!

## this issue of Series B

Posted in Books, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , on September 5, 2014 by xi'an

The September issue of [JRSS] Series B I received a few days ago is of particular interest to me. (And not as an ex-co-editor since I was never involved in any of those papers!) To wit: a paper by Hani Doss and Aixin Tan on evaluating normalising constants based on MCMC output, a preliminary version I had seen at a previous JSM meeting, a paper by Nick Polson, James Scott and Jesse Windle on the Bayesian bridge, connected with Nick’s talk in Boston earlier this month, yet another paper by Ariel Kleiner, Ameet Talwalkar, Purnamrita Sarkar and Michael Jordan on the bag of little bootstraps, which presentation I heard Michael deliver a few times when he was in Paris. (Obviously, this does not imply any negative judgement on the other papers of this issue!)

For instance, Doss and Tan consider the multiple mixture estimator [my wording, the authors do not give the method a name, referring to Vardi (1985) but missing the connection with Owen and Zhou (2000)] of k ratios of normalising constants, namely

$\sum_{l=1}^k \frac{1}{n_l} \sum_{t=1}^{n_l} \dfrac{n_l g_j(x_t^l)}{\sum_{s=1}^k n_s g_s(x_t^l) z_1/z_s } \longrightarrow \dfrac{z_j}{z_1}$

where the z’s are the normalising constants and with possible different numbers of iterations of each Markov chain. An interesting starting point (that Hans Künsch had mentioned to me a while ago but that I had since then forgotten) is that the problem was reformulated by Charlie Geyer (1994) as a quasi-likelihood estimation where the ratios of all z’s relative to one reference density are the unknowns. This is doubling interesting, actually, because it restates the constant estimation problem into a statistical light and thus somewhat relates to the infamous “paradox” raised by Larry Wasserman a while ago. The novelty in the paper is (a) to derive an optimal estimator of the ratios of normalising constants in the Markov case, essentially accounting for possibly different lengths of the Markov chains, and (b) to estimate the variance matrix of the ratio estimate by regeneration arguments. A favourite tool of mine, at least theoretically as practically useful minorising conditions are hard to come by, if at all available.

## Statistics and Computing special MCMSk’issue [call for papers]

Posted in Books, Mountains, R, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , on February 7, 2014 by xi'an

Following the exciting and innovative talks, posters and discussions at MCMski IV, the editor of Statistics and Computing, Mark Girolami (who also happens to be the new president-elect of the BayesComp section of ISBA, which is taking over the management of future MCMski meetings), kindly proposed to publish a special issue of the journal open to all participants to the meeting. Not only to speakers, mind, but to all participants.

So if you are interested in submitting a paper to this special issue of a computational statistics journal that is very close to our MCMski themes, I encourage you to do so. (Especially if you missed the COLT 2014 deadline!) The deadline for submissions is set on March 15 (a wee bit tight but we would dearly like to publish the issue in 2014, namely the same year as the meeting.) Submissions are to be made through the Statistics and Computing portal, with a mention that they are intended for the special issue.

An editorial committee chaired by Antonietta Mira and composed of Christophe Andrieu, Brad Carlin, Nicolas Chopin, Jukka Corander, Colin Fox, Nial Friel, Chris Holmes, Gareth Jones, Peter Müller, Antonietta Mira, Geoff Nicholls, Gareth Roberts, Håvård Rue, Robin Ryder, and myself, will examine the submissions and get back within a few weeks to the authors. In a spirit similar to the JRSS Read Paper procedure, submissions will first be examined collectively, before being sent to referees. We plan to publish the reviews as well, in order to include a global set of comments on the accepted papers. We intend to do it in The Economist style, i.e. as a set of edited anonymous comments. Usual instructions for Statistics and Computing apply, with the additional requirements that the paper should be around 10 pages and include at least one author who took part in MCMski IV.