day one at ISBA 22

Started the day with a much appreciated swimming practice in the [alas warm⁺⁺⁺] outdoor 50m pool on the Island with no one but me in the slooow lane. And had my first ride with the biXi system, surprised at having to queue behind other bikes at red lights! More significantly, it was a great feeling to reunite at last with so many friends I had not met for more than two years!!!

My friend Adrian Raftery gave the very first plenary lecture on his work on the Bayesian approach to long-term population projections, which was recently  a work censored by some US States, then counter-censored by the Supreme Court [too busy to kill Roe v. Wade!]. Great to see the use of Bayesian methods validated by the UN Population Division [with at least one branch of the UN

Stephen Lauritzen returning to de Finetti notion of a model as something not real or true at all, back to exchangeability. Making me wonder when exchangeability is more than a convenient assumption leading to the Hewitt-Savage theorem. And sufficiency. I mean, without falling into a Keynesian fallacy, each point of the sample has unique specificities that cannot be taken into account in an exchangeable model. Nice to hear some measure theory, though!!! Plus a comment on the median never being sufficient, recouping an older (and presumably not original) point of mine. Stephen’s (or Fisher’s?) argument being that the median cannot be recursively computed!

Antonietta Mira and I had our ABC session this afternoon with Cecilia Viscardi, Sirio Legramanti, and Massimiliano Tamborino (Warwick) as speakers. Cecilia linked ABC with normalising flows, in collaboration with Dennis Prangle (whose earlier paper on this connection was presented as the first One World ABC seminar). Thus using past simulations to approximate the posterior by a neural network, possibly with a significant increase in computing time when compared with more rudimentary SMC-ABC methods in larger dimensions. Sirio considered summary-free ABC based on discrepancies like Rademacher complexity. Which more or less contains MMD, Kullback-Leibler, Wasserstein and more, although it seems to be dependent on the parameterisation of the observations. An interesting opening at the end was that this approach could apply to non iid settings. Massi presented a paper coauthored with Umberto that had just been arXived. On sequential ABC with a dependence on the summary statistic (hence guided). Further bringing copulas into the game, although this forces another choice [for the marginals] in the method.

Tamara Broderick talked about a puzzling leverage effect of some observations in economic studies where a tiny portion of individuals may modify the significance or the sign of a coefficient, for which I cannot tell whether the data or the reliance on statistical significance are to blame. Robert Kohn presented mixture-of-Gaussian copulas [not to be confused with mixture of Gaussian-copulas!] and Nancy Reid concluded my first [and somewhat exhausting!] day at ISBA with a BFF talk on the different statistical paradigms take on confidence (for which the notion of calibration seems to remain frequentist).

Side comments: First, most people in the conference are wearing masks, which is great! Also, I find it hard to read slides from the screen, which I presume is an age issue (?!) Even more aside, I had Korean lunch in a place that refused to serve me a glass of water, which I find amazing.

delayed acceptance ABC-SMC

Last summer, during my vacation on Skye,  Richard Everitt and Paulina Rowińska arXived a paper on delayed acceptance associated with ABC. ArXival that I missed, then! In order to decrease the number of simulations from the likelihood. As in our own delayed acceptance paper (without ABC), a cheap alternative generator is used to first reject the least likely parameters values, before possibly continuing to use a full generator. Also as lazy ABC. The first step of this ABC algorithm requires a cheap generator plus a primary tolerance ε¹ to compare the generation with the data or part of it. This may be followed by a second generation with a second tolerance level ε². The paper applies more specifically ABC-SMC as introduced in Sisson, Fan and Tanaka (2007) and reassessed in our subsequent 2009 Biometrika paper with Mark Beaumont, Jean-Marie Cornuet and Jean-Michel Marin. As well as in the ABC-SMC paper by Pierre Del Moral and Arnaud Doucet.

When looking at the version of the algorithm [Algorithm 2] based on two basic acceptance ABC steps, there are two features I find intriguing: (i) the primary step uses a cheap generator to reject early poor values of the parameter, followed by the second step involving a more expensive and exact generator, but I see no impact of the choice of this cheap generator in the acceptance probability; (ii) this is an SMC algorithm with imposed resampling at each iteration but there is no visible step for creating new weights after the resampling step. In the current presentation, it sounds like the weights do not change from the initial step, except for those turning to zero and the renormalisation transforms. Which makes the (unspecified) stratification of little interest if any. I must therefore miss a point in the implementation!

One puzzling sentence in the appendix is that the resampling algorithm used in the SMC step “ensures that every particle that is alive before resampling is represented in the resampled particles”, which reminds me of an argument [possibly a different one] made already in Sisson, Fan and Tanaka (2007) and that we could not validate in our subsequent paper. For resampling to be correct, a form of multinomial sampling must be implemented, even via variance reduction schemes like stratified or systematic sampling.

efficient approximate Bayesian inference for models with intractable likelihood

Dalhin, Villani [Mattias, not Cédric] and Schön arXived a paper this week with the above title. The type of intractable likelihood they consider is a non-linear state-space (HMM) model and the SMC-ABC they propose is based on an optimised Laplace approximation. That is, replacing the posterior distribution on the parameter θ with a normal distribution obtained by a Taylor expansion of the log-likelihood. There is no obvious solution for deriving this approximation in the case of intractable likelihood functions and the authors make use of a Bayesian optimisation technique called Gaussian process optimisation (GPO). Meaning that the Laplace approximation is the Laplace approximation of a surrogate log-posterior. GPO is a Bayesian numerical method in the spirit of the probabilistic numerics discussed on the ‘Og a few weeks ago. In the current setting, this means iterating three steps

1. derive an approximation of the log-posterior ξ at the current θ using SMC-ABC
2. construct a surrogate log-posterior by a Gaussian process using the past (ξ,θ)’s
3. determine the next value of θ

In the first step, a standard particle filter cannot be used to approximate the observed log-posterior at θ because the conditional density of observed given latent is intractable. The solution is to use ABC for the HMM model, in the spirit of many papers by Ajay Jasra and co-authors. However, I find the construction of the substitute model allowing for a particle filter very obscure… (A side effect of the heat wave?!) I can spot a noisy ABC feature in equation (7), but am at a loss as to how the reparameterisation by the transform τ is compatible with the observed-given-latent conditional being unavailable: if the pair (x,v) at time t has a closed form expression, so does (x,y), at least on principle, since y is a deterministic transform of (x,v). Another thing I do not catch is why having a particle filter available prevent the use of a pMCMC approximation.

The second step constructs a Gaussian process posterior on the log-likelihood, with Gaussian errors on the ξ’s. The Gaussian process mean is chosen as zero, while the covariance function is a Matérn function. With hyperparameters that are estimated by maximum likelihood estimators (based on the argument that the marginal likelihood is available in closed form). Turning the approach into an empirical Bayes version.

The next design point in the sequence of θ’s is the argument of the maximum of a certain acquisition function, which is chosen here as a sort of maximum regret associated with the posterior predictive associated with the Gaussian process. With possible jittering. At this stage, it reminded me of the Gaussian process approach proposed by Michael Gutmann in his NIPS poster last year.

Overall, the method is just too convoluted for me to assess its worth and efficiency without a practical implementation to… practice upon, for which I do not have time! Hence I would welcome any comment from readers having attempted such implementations. I also wonder at the lack of link with Simon Wood‘s Gaussian approximation that appeared in Nature (2010) and was well-discussed in the Read Paper of Fearnhead and Prangle (2012).

ABC [almost] in the front news

My friend and Warwick colleague Gareth Roberts just published a paper in Nature with Ellen Brooks-Pollock and Matt Keeling from the University of Warwick on the modelling of bovine tuberculosis dynamics in Britain and on the impact of control measures. The data comes from the Cattle Tracing System and the VetNet national testing database. The mathematical model is based on a stochastic process and its six parameters are estimated by sequential ABC (SMC-ABC). The summary statistics chosen in the model are the number of infected farms per county per year and the number of reactors (cattle failing a test) per county per year.

“Therefore, we predict that control of local badger populations and hence control of environmental transmission will have a relatively limited effect on all measures of bovine TB incidence.”

This advanced modelling of a comprehensive dataset on TB in Britain quickly got into a high profile as it addresses the highly controversial (not to say plain stupid) culling of badgers (who also carry TB) advocated by the government. The study concludes that “only generic measures such as more national testing, whole herd culling or vaccination that affect all routes of transmission are effective at controlling the spread of bovine TB.” While the elimination of badgers from the English countryside would have a limited effect.  Good news for badgers! And the Badger Trust. Unsurprisingly, the study was immediately rejected by the UK farming minister! Not only does he object to the herd culling solution for economic reasons, but he “cannot accept the paper’s findings”. Maybe he does not like ABC… More seriously, the media oversimplified the findings of the study, “as usual”, with e.g. The Guardian headline of “tuberculosis threat requires mass cull of cattle”.

Pre-processing for approximate Bayesian computation in image analysis

With Matt Moores and Kerrie Mengersen, from QUT, we wrote this short paper just in time for the MCMSki IV Special Issue of Statistics & Computing. And arXived it, as well. The global idea is to cut down on the cost of running an ABC experiment by removing the simulation of a humongous state-space vector, as in Potts and hidden Potts model, and replacing it by an approximate simulation of the 1-d sufficient (summary) statistics. In that case, we used a division of the 1-d parameter interval to simulate the distribution of the sufficient statistic for each of those parameter values and to compute the expectation and variance of the sufficient statistic. Then the conditional distribution of the sufficient statistic is approximated by a Gaussian with these two parameters. And those Gaussian approximations substitute for the true distributions within an ABC-SMC algorithm à la Del Moral, Doucet and Jasra (2012).

Across 20 125 × 125 pixels simulated images, Matt’s algorithm took an average of 21 minutes per image for between 39 and 70 SMC iterations, while resorting to pseudo-data and deriving the genuine sufficient statistic took an average of 46.5 hours for 44 to 85 SMC iterations. On a realistic Landsat image, with a total of 978,380 pixels, the precomputation of the mapping function took 50 minutes, while the total CPU time on 16 parallel threads was 10 hours 38 minutes. By comparison, it took 97 hours for 10,000 MCMC iterations on this image, with a poor effective sample size of 390 values. Regular SMC-ABC algorithms cannot handle this scale: It takes 89 hours to perform a single SMC iteration! (Note that path sampling also operates in this framework, thanks to the same precomputation: in that case it took 2.5 hours for 10⁵ iterations, with an effective sample size of 10⁴…)

Since my student’s paper on Seaman et al (2012) got promptly rejected by TAS for quoting too extensively from my post, we decided to include me as an extra author and submitted the paper to this special issue as well.