population quasi-Monte Carlo

“Population Monte Carlo (PMC) is an important class of Monte Carlo methods, which utilizes a population of proposals to generate weighted samples that approximate the target distribution”

A return of the prodigal son!, with this arXival by Huang, Joseph, and Mak, of a paper on population Monte Carlo using quasi-random sequences. The construct is based on an earlier notion of Joseph and Mak, support points, which are defined wrt a given target distribution F as minimising the variability of a sample from F away from these points. (I would have used instead my late friend Bernhard Flury’s principal points!) The proposal uses Owen-style scrambled Sobol points, followed by a deterministic mixture weighting à la PMC, followed by importance support resampling to find the next location parameters of the proposal mixture (which is why I included an unrelated mixture surface as my post picture!). This importance support resampling is obviously less variable than the more traditional ways of resampling but the cost moves from O(M) to O(M²).

“The main computational complexity of the algorithm is O(M²) from computing the pairwise distance of the M weighted samples”

The covariance parameters are updated as in our 2008 paper. This new proposal is interesting and reasonable, with apparent significant gains, albeit I would have liked to see a clearer discussion of the actual computing costs of PQMC.

multinomial resampling by Metropolis

A few years ago Lawrence Murray wrote a note on accelerating the resampling stage in particle filters by using a Metropolis step. And GPUs. The notion that Metropolis can be applied in this setting is at first puzzling since exact multinomial sampling is available. And Metropolis requires convergence guarantees. Which Lawrence covers by a Raftery and Lewis assessment, which has severe limitations in general but may well be adequate for this very case, although possibly too conservative in the number of recommended Metropolis iterations. The gain brought by Metropolis is that it does not require summing up all the particle weights, and as a result the gain is real in that Metropolis beats all other approaches (time-wise) when the number of particles is not too large and the heterogeneity of the weighs not too  high. (I did not know of this note until Richard Everitt brought it to my attention.)

resampling methods

A paper that was arXived [and that I missed!] last summer is a work on resampling by Mathieu Gerber, Nicolas Chopin (CREST), and Nick Whiteley. Resampling is used to sample from a weighted empirical distribution and to correct for very small weights in a weighted sample that otherwise lead to degeneracy in sequential Monte Carlo (SMC). Since this step is based on random draws, it induces noise (while improving the estimation of the target), reducing this noise is preferable, hence the appeal of replacing plain multinomial sampling with more advanced schemes. The initial motivation is for sequential Monte Carlo where resampling is rife and seemingly compulsory, but this also applies to importance sampling when considering several schemes at once. I remember discussing alternative schemes with Nicolas, then completing his PhD, as well as Olivier Cappé, Randal Douc, and Eric Moulines at the time (circa 2004) we were working on the Hidden Markov book. And getting then a somewhat vague idea as to why systematic resampling failed to converge.

In this paper, Mathieu, Nicolas and Nick show that stratified sampling (where a uniform is generated on every interval of length 1/n) enjoys some form of consistent, while systematic sampling (where the “same” uniform is generated on every interval of length 1/n) does not necessarily enjoy this consistency. There actually exists cases where convergence does not occur. However, a residual version of systematic sampling (where systematic sampling is applied to the residuals of the decimal parts of the n-enlarged weights) is itself consistent.

The paper also studies the surprising feature uncovered by Kitagawa (1996) that stratified sampling applied to an ordered sample brings an error of O(1/n²) between the cdf rather than the usual O(1/n). It took me a while to even understand the distinction between the original and the ordered version (maybe because Nicolas used the empirical cdf during his SAD (Stochastic Algorithm Day!) talk, ecdf that is the same for ordered and initial samples).  And both systematic and deterministic sampling become consistent in this case. The result was shown in dimension one by Kitagawa (1996) but extends to larger dimensions via the magical trick of the Hilbert curve.

parallel adaptive importance sampling

Following Paul Russell’s talk at MCqMC 2016, I took a look at his recently arXived paper. In the plane to Sydney. The pseudo-code representation of the method is identical to our population Monte Carlo algorithm as is the suggestion to approximate the posterior by a mixture, but one novel aspect is to use Reich’s ensemble transportation at the resampling stage, in order to maximise the correlation between the original and the resampled versions of the particle systems. (As in our later versions of PMC, the authors also use as importance denominator the entire mixture rather than conditioning on the selected last-step particle.)

“The output of the resampling algorithm gives us a set of evenly weighted samples that we believe represents the target distribution well”

I disagree with this statement: Reweighting does not improve the quality of the posterior approximation, since it introduces more variability. If the original sample is found missing in its adequation to the target, so is the resampled one. Worse, by producing a sample with equal weights, this step may give a false impression of adequate representation…

Another unclear point in the pape relates to tuning the parameters of the mixture importance sampler. The paper discusses tuning these parameters during a burn-in stage, referring to “due to the constraints on adaptive MCMC algorithms”, which indeed is only pertinent for MCMC algorithms, since importance sampling can be constantly modified while remaining valid. This was a major point for advocating PMC. I am thus unsure what the authors mean by a burn-in period in such a context. Actually, I am also unsure on how they use effective sample size to select the new value of the importance parameter, e.g., the variance β in a random walk mixture: the effective sample size involves this variance implicitly through the realised sample hence changing β means changing the realised sample… This seems too costly to contemplate so I wonder at the way Figure 4.2 is produced.

“A popular approach for adaptive MCMC algorithms is to view the scaling parameter as a random variable which we can sample during the course of the MCMC iterations.”

While this is indeed an attractive notion [that I played with in the early days of adaptive MCMC, with the short-lived notion of cyber-parameters], I do not think it is of much help in optimising an MCMC algorithm, since the scaling parameter need be optimised, resulting into a time-inhomogeneous target. A more appropriate tool is thus stochastic optimisation à la Robbins-Monro, as exemplified in Andrieu and Moulines (2006). The paper however remains unclear as to how the scales are updated (see e.g. Section 4.2).

“Ideally, we would like to use a resampling algorithm which is not prohibitively costly for moderately or large sized ensembles, which preserves the mean of the samples, and which makes it much harder for the new samples to forget a significant region in the density.”

The paper also misses on the developments of the early 2000’s about more sophisticated resampling steps, especially Paul Fearnhead’s contributions (see also Nicolas Chopin’s thesis). There exist valid resampling methods that require a single uniform (0,1) to be drawn, rather than m. The proposed method has a flavour similar to systematic resampling, but I wonder at the validity of returning values that are averages of earlier simulations, since this modifies their distribution into ones with slimmer tails. (And it is parameterisation dependent.) Producing x_i with probability p_i is not the same as returning the average of the p_ix_i‘s.

SPA 2015 Oxford [my day #2]

Today I [barely made it on a delayed train from Leaminton Spa to Oxford as I] chaired my invited session at SPA 2015 on advanced MCMC methodology. The three speakers, Randal Douc, Mike Pitt and Matti Vihola, all gave talks related to the pseudo-marginal technique. For instance, Randal gave examples of guaranteed variance improvements by adding randomisation steps in the generation of the rv’s behind the unbiased estimation of the likelihood function. Mike Pitt presented the paper I discussed a little while ago about evaluating the computing performances of pseudo-marginal approximations, with a fairly compelling perspective [I may have missed from the paper] on approximating the distribution on the approximation to the log-likelihood as a normal. Which led me to ponder at the ultimate version where the log-likelihood itself would get directly simulated in an MCMC algorithm bypassing the preliminary simulation of the parameters. Sounds a bit too fantasy-like to be of any use… Matti Vihola also presented recent results with Christophe Andrieu on comparing pseudo-marginal approximations, based on convex ordering properties. They included a domination result on ABC-MCM algorithms, as noted in a recent post. Which made me musing about the overall importance of unbiasedness in the global picture, where all we need are converging approximations, in fine.