local kernel reduction for ABC
“…construction of low dimensional summary statistics can be performed as in a black box…”
Today Zhou and Fukuzumi just arXived a paper that proposes a gradient-based dimension reduction for ABC summary statistics, in the spirit of RKHS kernels as advocated, e.g., by Arthur Gretton. Here the projection is a mere linear projection Bs of the vector of summary statistics, s, where B is an estimated Hessian matrix associated with the posterior expectation E[θ|s]. (There is some connection with the latest version of Li’s and Fearnhead’s paper on ABC convergence as they also define a linear projection of the summary statistics, based on asymptotic arguments, although their matrix does depend on the true value of the parameter.) The linearity sounds like a strong restriction [to me] especially when the summary statistics have no reason to belong to a vectorial space and thus be open to changes of bases and linear projections. For instance, a specific value taken by a summary statistic, like 0 say, may be more relevant than the range of their values. On a larger scale, I am doubtful about always projecting a vector of summary statistics on a subspace with the smallest possible dimension, ie the dimension of θ. In practical settings, it seems impossible to derive the optimal projection and a subvector is almost certain to loose information against a larger vector.
“Another proposal is to use different summary statistics for different parameters.”
Which is exactly what we did in our random forest estimation paper. Using a different forest for each parameter of interest (but no real tree was damaged in the experiment!).
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