## parallelizable sampling method for parameter inference of large biochemical reaction models

Posted in Books, Statistics with tags , , , , , , , , on June 18, 2018 by xi'an

I came across this older (2016) arXiv paper by Jan Mikelson and Mustafa Khammash [antidated as of April 25, 2018] as another version of nested sampling. The novelty of the approach is in applying nested sampling for approximating the likelihood function in the case of involved hidden Markov models (although the name itself does not appear in the paper). This is an interesting proposal, even though there is a fairly large and very active literature on computational approaches to such objects, from sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) to particle MCMC (pMCMC), to SMC².

“We found a way to efficiently sample parameter vectors (particles) from the super level set of the likelihood (sets of particles with a likelihood equal to or higher than some threshold) corresponding to an increasing sequence of thresholds” (p.2)

The approach here is an aggregate of nested sampling and particle filters (SMC), filters that are paradoxically employed in approximating the likelihood function itself, thus called repeatedly as the value of the parameter θ changes, unless I am confused, when it seems to me that, once started with particle filters, the authors could have used them all the way to the upper level (through, again, SMC²). Instead, and that brings a further degree of (uncorrected) approximation to the procedure, a Dirichlet process prior is used to estimate Gaussian mixture approximations to the true posterior distribution(s) on the (super) level sets. Now, approximating a distribution that is zero outside a compact set [the prior restricted to the likelihood being larger than by a distribution with an infinite support does not a priori sound like a particularly enticing idea. Note also that there is no later correction for using the mixture approximation to the restricted prior. (The method also involves an approximation of the (Lebesgue) volume of the level sets that may be poor in higher dimensions.)

“DP-GMM estimations work very well in high dimensional spaces and since we use rejection sampling to obtain samples from the level set by sampling from the DP-GMM estimation, the estimation error does not get propagated through iterations.” (p.13)

One aspect of the paper that puzzles me is the use of a rejection sampler to produce new parameters simulations from a given (super) level set, as this involves a lower bound M on the Gaussian mixture approximation over this level set. If a Gaussian mixture approximation is available, there is apparently no need for this as it can be sampled directly and values below the threshold can be disposed of. It is also unclear why the error does not propagate from one level to the next, if only because of the connection between the successive particle approximations.

## controlled sequential Monte Carlo [BiPS seminar]

Posted in Statistics with tags , , , , , , , on June 5, 2018 by xi'an

The last BiPS seminar of the semester will be given by Jeremy Heng (Harvard) on Monday 11 June at 2pm, in room 3001, ENSAE, Paris-Saclay about his Controlled sequential Monte Carlo paper:

Sequential Monte Carlo methods, also known as particle methods, are a popular set of techniques to approximate high-dimensional probability distributions and their normalizing constants. They have found numerous applications in statistics and related fields as they can be applied to perform state estimation for non-linear non-Gaussian state space models and Bayesian inference for complex static models. Like many Monte Carlo sampling schemes, they rely on proposal distributions which have a crucial impact on their performance. We introduce here a class of controlled sequential Monte Carlo algorithms, where the proposal distributions are determined by approximating the solution to an associated optimal control problem using an iterative scheme. We provide theoretical analysis of our proposed methodology and demonstrate significant gains over state-of-the-art methods at a fixed computational complexity on a variety of applications.

## Better together in Kolkata [slides]

Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 4, 2018 by xi'an

Here are the slides of the talk on modularisation I am giving today at the PC Mahalanobis 125 Conference in Kolkata, mostly borrowed from Pierre’s talk at O’Bayes 2018 last month:

[which made me realise Slideshare has discontinued the option to update one’s presentation, forcing users to create a new presentation for each update!] Incidentally, the amphitheatre at ISI is located right on top of a geological exhibit room with a reconstituted Barapasaurus tagorei so I will figuratively ride a dinosaur during my talk!

## the Hyvärinen score is back

Posted in pictures, Statistics, Travel with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 21, 2017 by xi'an

Stéphane Shao, Pierre Jacob and co-authors from Harvard have just posted on arXiv a new paper on Bayesian model comparison using the Hyvärinen score

$\mathcal{H}(y, p) = 2\Delta_y \log p(y) + ||\nabla_y \log p(y)||^2$

which thus uses the Laplacian as a natural and normalisation-free penalisation for the score test. (Score that I first met in Padova, a few weeks before moving from X to IX.) Which brings a decision-theoretic alternative to the Bayes factor and which delivers a coherent answer when using improper priors. Thus a very appealing proposal in my (biased) opinion! The paper is mostly computational in that it proposes SMC and SMC² solutions to handle the estimation of the Hyvärinen score for models with tractable likelihoods and tractable completed likelihoods, respectively. (Reminding me that Pierre worked on SMC² algorithms quite early during his Ph.D. thesis.)

A most interesting remark in the paper is to recall that the Hyvärinen score associated with a generic model on a series must be the prequential (predictive) version

$\mathcal{H}_T (M) = \sum_{t=1}^T \mathcal{H}(y_t; p_M(dy_t|y_{1:(t-1)}))$

rather than the version on the joint marginal density of the whole series. (Followed by a remark within the remark that the logarithm scoring rule does not make for this distinction. And I had to write down the cascading representation

$\log p(y_{1:T})=\sum_{t=1}^T \log p(y_t|y_{1:t-1})$

to convince myself that this unnatural decomposition, where the posterior on θ varies on each terms, is true!) For consistency reasons.

This prequential decomposition is however a plus in terms of computation when resorting to sequential Monte Carlo. Since each time step produces an evaluation of the associated marginal. In the case of state space models, another decomposition of the authors, based on measurement densities and partial conditional expectations of the latent states allows for another (SMC²) approximation. The paper also establishes that for non-nested models, the Hyvärinen score as a model selection tool asymptotically selects the closest model to the data generating process. For the divergence induced by the score. Even for state-space models, under some technical assumptions.  From this asymptotic perspective, the paper exhibits an example where the Bayes factor and the Hyvärinen factor disagree, even asymptotically in the number of observations, about which mis-specified model to select. And last but not least the authors propose and assess a discrete alternative relying on finite differences instead of derivatives. Which remains a proper scoring rule.

I am quite excited by this work (call me biased!) and I hope it can induce following works as a viable alternative to Bayes factors, if only for being more robust to the [unspecified] impact of the prior tails. As in the above picture where some realisations of the SMC² output and of the sequential decision process see the wrong model being almost acceptable for quite a long while…

## impressions from EcoSta2017 [guest post]

Posted in pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , on July 6, 2017 by xi'an

[This is a guest post on the recent EcoSta2017 (Econometrics and Statistics) conference in Hong Kong, contributed by Chris Drovandi from QUT, Brisbane.]

There were (at least) two sessions on Bayesian Computation at the recent EcoSta (Econometrics and Statistics) 2017 conference in Hong Kong. Below is my review of them. My overall impression of the conference is that there were lots of interesting talks, albeit a lot in financial time series, not my area. Even so I managed to pick up a few ideas/concepts that could be useful in my research. One criticism I had was that there were too many sessions in parallel, which made choosing quite difficult and some sessions very poorly attended. Another criticism of many participants I spoke to was that the location of the conference was relatively far from the city area.

In the first session (chaired by Robert Kohn), Minh-Ngoc Tran spoke about this paper on Bayesian estimation of high-dimensional Copula models with mixed discrete/continuous margins. Copula models with all continuous margins are relatively easy to deal with, but when the margins are discrete or mixed there are issues with computing the likelihood. The main idea of the paper is to re-write the intractable likelihood as an integral over a hypercube of ≤J dimensions (where J is the number of variables), which can then be estimated unbiasedly (with variance reduction by using randomised quasi-MC numbers). The paper develops advanced (correlated) pseudo-marginal and variational Bayes methods for inference.

In the following talk, Chris Carter spoke about different types of pseudo-marginal methods, particle marginal Metropolis-Hastings and particle Gibbs for state space models. Chris suggests that a combination of these methods into a single algorithm can further improve mixing. Continue reading

## SMC on a sequence of increasing dimension targets

Posted in Statistics with tags , , , , , , , , , on February 15, 2017 by xi'an

Richard Everitt and co-authors have arXived a preliminary version of a paper entitled Sequential Bayesian inference for mixture models and the coalescent using sequential Monte Carlo samplers with transformations. The central notion is an SMC version of the Carlin & Chib (1995) completion in the comparison of models in different dimensions. Namely to create auxiliary variables for each model in such a way that the dimension of the completed models are all the same. (Reversible jump MCMC à la Peter Green (1995) can also be interpreted this way, even though only relevant bits of the completion are used in the transitions.) I find the paper and the topic most interesting if only because it relates to earlier papers of us on population Monte Carlo. It also brought to my awareness the paper by Karagiannis and Andrieu (2013) on annealed reversible jump MCMC that I had missed at the time it appeared. The current paper exploits this annealed expansion in the devising of the moves. (Sequential Monte Carlo on a sequence of models with increasing dimension has been studied in the past.)

The way the SMC is described in the paper, namely, reweight-subsample-move, does not strike me as the most efficient as I would try to instead move-reweight-subsample, using a relevant move that incorporate the new model and hence enhance the chances of not rejecting.

One central application of the paper is mixture models with an unknown number of components. The SMC approach applied to this problem means creating a new component at each iteration t and moving the existing particles after adding the parameters of the new component. Since using the prior for this new part is unlikely to be at all efficient, a split move as in Richardson and Green (1997) can be considered, which brings back the dreaded Jacobian of RJMCMC into the picture! Here comes an interesting caveat of the method, namely that the split move forces a choice of the split component of the mixture. However, this does not appear as a strong difficulty, solved in the paper by auxiliary [index] variables, but possibly better solved by a mixture representation of the proposal, as in our PMC [population Monte Carlo] papers. Which also develop a family of SMC algorithms, incidentally. We found there that using a mixture representation of the proposal achieves a provable variance reduction.

“This puts a requirement on TSMC that the single transition it makes must be successful.”

As pointed by the authors, the transformation SMC they develop faces the drawback that a given model is only explored once in the algorithm, when moving to the next model. On principle, there would be nothing wrong in including regret steps, retracing earlier models in the light of the current one, since each step is an importance sampling step valid on its own right. But SMC also offers a natural albeit potentially high-varianced approximation to the marginal likelihood, which is quite appealing when comparing with an MCMC outcome. However, it would have been nice to see a comparison with alternative estimates of the marginal in the case of mixtures of distributions. I also wonder at the comparative performances of a dual approach that would be sequential in the number of observations as well, as in Chopin (2004) or our first population Monte Carlo paper (Cappé et al., 2005), since subsamples lead to tempered versions of the target and hence facilitate moves between models, being associated with flatter likelihoods.

## anytime algorithm

Posted in Books, Statistics with tags , , , , , , , , , on January 11, 2017 by xi'an

Lawrence Murray, Sumeet Singh, Pierre Jacob, and Anthony Lee (Warwick) recently arXived a paper on Anytime Monte Carlo. (The earlier post on this topic is no coincidence, as Lawrence had told me about this problem when he visited Paris last Spring. Including a forced extension when his passport got stolen.) The difficulty with anytime algorithms for MCMC is the lack of exchangeability of the MCMC sequence (except for formal settings where regeneration can be used).

When accounting for duration of computation between steps of an MCMC generation, the Markov chain turns into a Markov jump process, whose stationary distribution α is biased by the average delivery time. Unless it is constant. The authors manage this difficulty by interlocking the original chain with a secondary chain so that even- and odd-index chains are independent. The secondary chain is then discarded. This provides a way to run an anytime MCMC. The principle can be extended to K+1 chains, run one after the other, since only one of those chains need be discarded. It also applies to SMC and SMC². The appeal of anytime simulation in this particle setting is that resampling is no longer a bottleneck. Hence easily distributed among processors. One aspect I do not fully understand is how the computing budget is handled, since allocating the same real time to each iteration of SMC seems to envision each target in the sequence as requiring the same amount of time. (An interesting side remark made in this paper is the lack of exchangeability resulting from elaborate resampling mechanisms, lack I had not thought of before.)