## ABC with no prior

Posted in Books, Kids, pictures with tags , , , , , , on April 30, 2018 by xi'an

“I’m trying to fit a complex model to some data that take a large amount of time to run. I’m also unable to write down a Likelihood function to this problem and so I turned to approximate Bayesian computation (ABC). Now, given the slowness of my simulations, I used Sequential ABC (…) In fact, contrary to the concept of Bayesian statistics (new knowledge updating old knowledge) I would like to remove all the influence of the priors from my estimates. “

A question from X validated where I have little to contribute as the originator of the problem had the uttermost difficulties to understand that ABC could not be run without a probability structure on the parameter space. Maybe a fiducialist in disguise?! To this purpose this person simulated from a collection of priors and took the best 5% across the priors, which is akin to either running a mixture prior or to use ABC for conducting prior choice, which reminds me of a paper of Toni et al. Not that it helps removing “all the influence of the priors”, of course…

An unrelated item of uninteresting trivia is that a question I posted in 2012 on behalf of my former student Gholamossein Gholami about the possibility to use EM to derive a Weibull maximum likelihood estimator (instead of sheer numerical optimisation) got over the 10⁴ views. But no answer so far!

## dynamic mixtures [at NBBC15]

Posted in R, Statistics with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 18, 2015 by xi'an

A funny coincidence: as I was sitting next to Arnoldo Frigessi at the NBBC15 conference, I came upon a new question on Cross Validated about a dynamic mixture model he had developed in 2002 with Olga Haug and Håvård Rue [whom I also saw last week in Valencià]. The dynamic mixture model they proposed replaces the standard weights in the mixture with cumulative distribution functions, hence the term dynamic. Here is the version used in their paper (x>0)

$(1-w_{\mu,\tau}(x))f_{\beta,\lambda}(x)+w_{\mu,\tau}(x)g_{\epsilon,\sigma}(x)$

where f is a Weibull density, g a generalised Pareto density, and w is the cdf of a Cauchy distribution [all distributions being endowed with standard parameters]. While the above object is not a mixture of a generalised Pareto and of a Weibull distributions (instead, it is a mixture of two non-standard distributions with unknown weights), it is close to the Weibull when x is near zero and ends up with the Pareto tail (when x is large). The question was about simulating from this distribution and, while an answer was in the paper, I replied on Cross Validated with an alternative accept-reject proposal and with a somewhat (if mildly) non-standard MCMC implementation enjoying a much higher acceptance rate and the same fit.