## on estimating constants…

Posted in pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , on July 21, 2015 by xi'an

While I discussed on the ‘Og in the past the difference I saw between estimating an unknown parameter from a distribution and evaluating a normalising constant, evaluating such constants and hence handling [properly] doubly intractable models is obviously of the utmost importance! For this reason, Nial Friel, Helen Ogden and myself have put together a CRiSM workshop on the topic (with the tongue-in-cheek title of Estimating constants!), to be held at the University of Warwick next April 20-22.

The CRiSM workshop will focus on computational methods for approximating challenging normalising constants found in Monte Carlo, likelihood and Bayesian models. Such methods may be used in a wide range of problems: to compute intractable likelihoods, to find the evidence in Bayesian model selection, and to compute the partition function in Physics. The meeting will bring together different communities working on these related problems, some of which have developed original if little advertised solutions. It will also highlight the novel challenges associated with large data and highly complex models. Besides a dozen invited talks, the schedule will highlight two afternoon poster sessions with speed (2-5mn) oral presentations called ‘Elevator’ talks.

While 2016 is going to be quite busy with all kinds of meetings (MCMSkv, ISBA 2016, the CIRM Statistics month, AISTATS 2016, …), this should be an exciting two-day workshop, given the on-going activity in this area, and I thus suggest interested readers to mark the dates in their diary. I will obviously keep you posted about registration and accommodation when those entries are available.

## maths house, University of Warwick

Posted in pictures, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , on July 16, 2015 by xi'an

## art brut

Posted in pictures, Travel, University life with tags , , , on June 28, 2015 by xi'an

## approximate maximum likelihood estimation using data-cloning ABC

Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , on June 2, 2015 by xi'an

“By accepting of having obtained a poor approximation to the posterior, except for the location of its main mode, we switch to maximum likelihood estimation.”

Presumably the first paper ever quoting from the ‘Og! Indeed, Umberto Picchini arXived a paper about a technique merging ABC with prior feedback (rechristened data cloning by S. Lele), where a maximum likelihood estimate is produced by an ABC-MCMC algorithm. For state-space models. This relates to an earlier paper by Fabio Rubio and Adam Johansen (Warwick), who also suggested using ABC to approximate the maximum likelihood estimate. Here, the idea is to use an increasing number of replicates of the latent variables, as in our SAME algorithm, to spike the posterior around the maximum of the (observed) likelihood. An ABC version of this posterior returns a mean value as an approximate maximum likelihood estimate.

“This is a so-called “likelihood-free” approach [Sisson and Fan, 2011], meaning that knowledge of the complete expression for the likelihood function is not required.”

The above remark is sort of inappropriate in that it applies to a non-ABC setting where the latent variables are simulated from the exact marginal distributions, that is, unconditional on the data, and hence their density cancels in the Metropolis-Hastings ratio. This pre-dates ABC by a few years, since this was an early version of particle filter.

“In this work we are explicitly avoiding the most typical usage of ABC, where the posterior is conditional on summary statistics of data S(y), rather than y.”

Another point I find rather negative in that, for state-space models, using the entire time-series as a “summary statistic” is unlikely to produce a good approximation.

The discussion on the respective choices of the ABC tolerance δ and on the prior feedback number of copies K is quite interesting, in that Umberto Picchini suggests setting δ first before increasing the number of copies. However, since the posterior gets more and more peaked as K increases, the consequences on the acceptance rate of the related ABC algorithm are unclear. Another interesting feature is that the underlying MCMC proposal on the parameter θ is an independent proposal, tuned during the warm-up stage of the algorithm. Since the tuning is repeated at each temperature, there are some loose ends as to whether or not it is a genuine Markov chain method. The same question arises when considering that additional past replicas need to be simulated when K increases. (Although they can be considered as virtual components of a vector made of an infinite number of replicas, to be used when needed.)

The simulation study involves a regular regression with 101 observations, a stochastic Gompertz model studied by Sophie Donnet, Jean-Louis Foulley, and Adeline Samson in 2010. With 12 points. And a simple Markov model. Again with 12 points. While the ABC-DC solutions are close enough to the true MLEs whenever available, a comparison with the cheaper ABC Bayes estimates would have been of interest as well.

## 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.

## non-reversible MCMC

Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , on May 21, 2015 by xi'an

While visiting Dauphine, Natesh Pillai and Aaron Smith pointed out this interesting paper of Joris Bierkens (Warwick) that had escaped my arXiv watch/monitoring. The paper is about turning Metropolis-Hastings algorithms into non-reversible versions, towards improving mixing.

In a discrete setting, a way to produce a non-reversible move is to mix the proposal kernel Q with its time-reversed version Q’ and use an acceptance probability of the form

$\epsilon\pi(y)Q(y,x)+(1-\epsilon)\pi(x)Q(x,y) \big/ \pi(x)Q(x,y)$

where ε is any weight. This construction is generalised in the paper to any vorticity (skew-symmetric with zero sum rows) matrix Γ, with the acceptance probability

$\epsilon\Gamma(x,y)+\pi(y)Q(y,x)\big/\pi(x)Q(x,y)$

where ε is small enough to ensure all numerator values are non-negative. This is a rather annoying assumption in that, except for the special case derived from the time-reversed kernel, it has to be checked over all pairs (x,y). (I first thought it also implied the normalising constant of π but everything can be set in terms of the unormalised version of π, Γ or ε included.) The paper establishes that the new acceptance probability preserves π as its stationary distribution. An alternative construction is to make the proposal change from Q in H such that H(x,y)=Q(x,y)+εΓ(x,y)/π(x). Which seems more pertinent as not changing the proposal cannot improve that much the mixing behaviour of the chain. Still, the move to the non-reversible versions has the noticeable plus of decreasing the asymptotic variance of the Monte Carlo estimate for any integrable function. Any. (Those results are found in the physics literature of the 2000’s.)

The extension to the continuous case is a wee bit more delicate. One needs to find an anti-symmetric vortex function g with zero integral [equivalent to the row sums being zero] such that g(x,y)+π(y)q(y,x)>0 and with same support as π(x)q(x,y) so that the acceptance probability of g(x,y)+π(y)q(y,x)/π(x)q(x,y) leads to π being the stationary distribution. Once again g(x,y)=ε(π(y)q(y,x)-π(x)q(x,y)) is a natural candidate but it is unclear to me why it should work. As the paper only contains one illustration for the discretised Ornstein-Uhlenbeck model, with the above choice of g for a small enough ε (a point I fail to understand since any ε<1 should provide a positive g(x,y)+π(y)q(y,x)), it is also unclear to me that this modification (i) is widely applicable and (ii) is relevant for genuine MCMC settings.

## a war[like] week

Posted in Books, Kids, pictures, Running, Statistics, Travel, University life, Wines with tags , , , , , , , , , , on April 29, 2015 by xi'an

This week in Warwick was one of the busiest ones ever as I had to juggle between two workshops, including one in Oxford, a departmental meeting, two paper revisions, two pre-vivas, and a seminar in Leeds. Not to mention a broken toe (!), a flat tire (!!), and a diner at the X. Hardly anytime for writing blog entries..! Fortunately, I managed to squeeze time for working with Kerrie Mengersen who was visiting Warwick this fortnight. Finding new directions for the (A)BCel approach we developed a few years ago with Pierre Pudlo. The workshop in Oxford was quite informal with talks from PhD students [I fear I cannot discuss here as the papers are not online yet]. And one talk by François Caron about estimating sparse networks with not exactly exchangeable priors and completely random measures. And one talk by Kerrie Mengersen on a new and in-progress approach to handling Big Data that I found quite convincing (if again cannot discuss here). The probabilistic numerics workshop was discussed in yesterday’s post and I managed to discuss it a wee bit further with the organisers at The X restaurant in Kenilworth. (As a superfluous aside, and after a second sampling this year, I concluded that the Michelin star somewhat undeserved in that the dishes at The X are not particularly imaginative or tasty, the excellent sourdough bread being the best part of the meal!) I was expecting the train ride to Leeds to be highly bucolic as it went through the sunny countryside of South Yorkshire, with newly born lambs running in the bright green fields surrounded by old stone walls…, but instead went through endless villages with their rows of brick houses. Not that I have anything against brick houses, mind! Only, I had not realised how dense this part of England was, this presumably getting back all the way to the Industrial Revolution with the Manchester-Leeds-Birmingham triangle.

My seminar in Leeds was as exciting as in Amsterdam last week and with a large audience, so I got many and only interesting questions, from the issue of turning the output (i.e., the posterior on α) into a decision rule, to making  decision in the event of a non-conclusive posterior, to links with earlier frequentist resolutions, to whether or not we were able to solve the Lindley-Jeffreys paradox (we are not!, which makes a lot of sense), to the possibility of running a subjective or a sequential version. After the seminar I enjoyed a perfect Indian dinner at Aagrah, apparently a Yorkshire institution, with the right balance between too hot and too mild, i.e., enough spices to break a good sweat but not too many to loose any sense of taste!