Archive for data generating process

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ABCDE for approximate Bayesian conditional density estimation

Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 26, 2018 by xi'an

Another arXived paper I surprisingly (?) missed, by George Papamakarios and Iain Murray, on an ABCDE (my acronym!) substitute to ABC for generative models. The paper was reviewed [with reviews made available!] and accepted by NIPS 2016. (Most obviously, I was not one of the reviewers!)

“Conventional ABC algorithms such as the above suffer from three drawbacks. First, they only represent the parameter posterior as a set of (possibly weighted or correlated) samples [for which] it is not obvious how to perform some other computations using samples, such as combining posteriors from two separate analyses. Second, the parameter samples do not come from the correct Bayesian posterior (…) Third, as the ε-tolerance is reduced, it can become impractical to simulate the model enough times to match the observed data even once [when] simulations are expensive to perform”

The above criticisms are a wee bit overly harsh as, well…, Monte Carlo approximations remain a solution worth considering for all Bayesian purposes!, while the approximation [replacing the data with a ball] in ABC is replaced with an approximation of the true posterior as a mixture. Both requiring repeated [and likely expensive] simulations. The alternative is in iteratively simulating from pseudo-predictives towards learning better pseudo-posteriors, then used as new proposals at the next iteration modulo an importance sampling correction.  The approximation to the posterior chosen therein is a mixture density network, namely a mixture distribution with parameters obtained as neural networks based on the simulated pseudo-observations. Which the authors claim [p.4] requires no tuning. (Still, there are several aspects to tune, from the number of components to the hyper-parameter λ [p.11, eqn (35)], to the structure of the neural network [20 tanh? 50 tanh?], to the number of iterations, to the amount of X checking. As usual in NIPS papers, it is difficult to assess how arbitrary the choices made in the experiments are. Unless one starts experimenting with the codes provided.) All in all, I find the paper nonetheless exciting enough (!) to now start a summer student project on it in Dauphine and hope to check the performances of ABCDE on different models, as well as comparing this ABC implementation with a synthetic likelihood version.

 As an addendum, let me point out the very pertinent analysis of this paper by Dennis Prangle, 18 months ago!

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1500 nuances of gan [gan gan style]

Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , on February 16, 2018 by xi'an

I recently realised that there is a currently very popular trend in machine learning called GAN [for generative adversarial networks] that strongly connects with ABC, at least in that it relies mostly on the availability of a generative model, i.e., a probability model that can be generated as in x​​​=G(ϵ;θ), to draw inference about θ [or predictions]. For instance, there was a GANs tutorial at NIPS 2016 by Ian Goodfellow and many talks on the topic at recent NIPS, the 1500 in the title referring to the citations of the GAN paper by Goodfellow et al. (2014). (The name adversarial comes from opposing true model to generative model in the inference. )

If you remember Jeffreys‘s famous pique about classical tests as being based on improbable events that did not happen, GAN, like ABC,  is sort of the opposite in that it generates events until the one that was observed happens. More precisely, by generating pseudo-samples and switching parameters θ until these samples get as confused as possible between the data generating (“true”) distribution and the generative one. (In its original incarnation, GAN is indeed an optimisation scheme in θ.) A basic presentation of GAN is that it constructs a function D(x,ϕ) that represents the probability that x came from the true model p versus the generative model, ϕ being the parameter of a neural network trained to this effect, aimed at minimising in ϕ a two-term objective function

E​​[log D(x,ϕ)]+E​​​[log(1−D(G(ϵ;θ),ϕ))]

where the first expectation is taken under the true model and the second one under the generative model.

“The discriminator tries to best distinguish samples away from the generator. The generator tries to produce samples that are indistinguishable by the discriminator.” Edward

One ABC perception of this technique is that the confusion rate

E​​​[log(1−D(G(ϵ;θ),ϕ))]

is a form of distance between the data and the generative model. Which expectation can be approximated by repeated simulations from this generative model. Which suggests an extension from the optimisation approach to a ABCyesian version by selecting the smallest distances across a range of θ‘s simulated from the prior.

This notion relates to solution using classification tools as density ratio estimation, connecting for instance to Gutmann and Hyvärinen (2012). And ultimately with Geyer’s 1992 normalising constant estimator.

Another link between ABC and networks also came out during that trip. Proposed by Bishop (1994), mixture density networks (MDN) are mixture representations of the posterior [with component parameters functions of the data] trained on the prior predictive through a neural network. These MDNs can be trained on the ABC learning table [based on a specific if redundant choice of summary statistics] and used as substitutes to the posterior distribution, which brings an interesting alternative to Simon Wood’s synthetic likelihood. In a paper I missed Papamakarios and Murray suggest replacing regular ABC with this version…

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Monte Carlo simulation and resampling methods for social science [book review]

Posted in Books, Kids, R, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , on October 6, 2014 by xi'an

Monte Carlo simulation and resampling methods for social science is a short paperback written by Thomas Carsey and Jeffrey Harden on the use of Monte Carlo simulation to evaluate the adequacy of a model and the impact of assumptions behind this model. I picked it in the library the other day and browsed through the chapters during one of my métro rides. Definitely not an in-depth reading, so be warned before reading the [telegraphic] review!

Overall, I think the book is doing a good job of advocating the use of simulation to evaluate the pros and cons of a given model (rephrased as data generating process) when faced with data. And doing it in R. After some rudiments in probability theory and in R programming, it briefly explains the use of resident random generators if not of how to handle new distributions and then spend a large part of the book on simulation around generalised and regular linear models. For instance, in the linear model, the authors test the impact of heterocedasticity, multicollinearity, measurement error, omitted variable(s), serial correlation, clustered data, and heavy-tailed errors. While this is a perfect way of exploring those semi-hidden hypotheses behind the linear model, I wonder at the impact on students of this exploration. On the one hand, they will perceive the importance of those assumptions and hopefully remember them. On the other hand, and this is a very recurrent criticism of mine, this implies a lot of maturity from the students, i.e., they have to distinguish the data, the model [maybe] behind the data, the finite if large number of hypotheses one can test, and the interpretation of the outcome of a simulation test… Given that they were introduced to basic probability just a few chapters before, this expectation [from the students] may prove unrealistic. (And a similar criticism applies to the following chapters, from GLM to jackknife and bootstrap.)

At the end of the book, the authors ask the question as to how could a reader use the information in this book towards one’s work. Drafting a generic protocol for this reader, who is supposed to consider “alterations to the data generating process” (p.272) and to “identify a possible problem or assumption violation” (p.271). Thus requiring a readership “who has some training in quantitative methods” (p.1). And then some more. But I definitely sympathise with the goal of confronting models and theory with the harsh reality of simulation output!

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