“[The] existing Bayesian method (Saatchi & Wilson, 2017) may lead to incompatible conditionals, which suggest that the underlying joint distribution actually does not exist.”
Archive for GANs
“more Bayesian” GANs
Posted in Books, Statistics with tags Bayesian GANs, compatible conditional distributions, GANs, MCMC convergence, pseudo-likelihood on December 21, 2018 by xi'anImplicit maximum likelihood estimates
Posted in Statistics with tags ABC, Approximate Bayesian computation, GANs, Hyvärinen score, Kullback-Leibler divergence, likelihood-free methods, maximum likelihood estimation, NIPS 2018, Peter Diggle, untractable normalizing constant, Wasserstein distance on October 9, 2018 by xi'anAn ‘Og’s reader pointed me to this paper by Li and Malik, which made it to arXiv after not making it to NIPS. While the NIPS reviews were not particularly informative and strongly discordant, the authors point out in the comments that they are available for the sake of promoting discussion. (As made clear in earlier posts, I am quite supportive of this attitude! Disclaimer: I was not involved in an evaluation of this paper, neither for NIPS nor for another conference or journal!!) Although the paper does not seem to mention ABC in the setting of implicit likelihoods and generative models, there is a reference to the early (1984) paper by Peter Diggle and Richard Gratton that is often seen as the ancestor of ABC methods. The authors point out numerous issues with solutions proposed for parameter estimation in such implicit models. For instance, for GANs, they signal that “minimizing the Jensen-Shannon divergence or the Wasserstein distance between the empirical data distribution and the model distribution does not necessarily minimize the same between the true data distribution and the model distribution.” (Not mentioning the particular difficulty with Bayesian GANs.) Their own solution is the implicit maximum likelihood estimator, which picks the value of the parameter θ bringing a simulated sample the closest to the observed sample. Closest in the sense of the Euclidean distance between both samples. Or between the minimum of several simulated samples and the observed sample. (The modelling seems to imply the availability of n>1 observed samples.) They advocate using a stochastic gradient descent approach for finding the optimal parameter θ which presupposes that the dependence between θ and the simulated samples is somewhat differentiable. (And this does not account for using a min, which would make differentiation close to impossible.) The paper then meanders in a lengthy discussion as to whether maximising the likelihood makes sense, with a rather naïve view on why using the empirical distribution in a Kullback-Leibler divergence does not make sense! What does not make sense is considering the finite sample approximation to the Kullback-Leibler divergence with the true distribution in my opinion.
Gibbs for incompatible kids
Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags Bayesian GANs, convergence of Gibbs samplers, GANs, Gibbs for Kids, Gibbs sampling, irreducibility, JCGS, Markov chains, MCMC algorithms, Monte Carlo Statistical Methods, stationarity on September 27, 2018 by xi'an
In continuation of my earlier post on Bayesian GANs, which resort to strongly incompatible conditionals, I read a 2015 paper of Chen and Ip that I had missed. (Published in the Journal of Statistical Computation and Simulation which I first confused with JCGS and which I do not know at all. Actually, when looking at its editorial board, I recognised only one name.) But the study therein is quite disappointing and not helping as it considers Markov chains on finite state spaces, meaning that the transition distributions are matrices, meaning also that convergence is ensured if these matrices have no null probability term. And while the paper is motivated by realistic situations where incompatible conditionals can reasonably appear, the paper only produces illustrations on two and three states Markov chains. Not that helpful, in the end… The game is still afoot!
JSM 2018 [#1]
Posted in Mountains, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags British Columbia, Canada, curse of dimensionality, deep learning, GANs, JSM 2018, overfitting, regularisation, sparsity, stochastic gradient descent, Vancouver on July 30, 2018 by xi'an
As our direct flight from Paris landed in the morning in Vancouver, we found ourselves in the unusual situation of a few hours to kill before accessing our rental and where else better than a general introduction to deep learning in the first round of sessions at JSM2018?! In my humble opinion, or maybe just because it was past midnight in Paris time!, the talk was pretty uninspiring in missing the natural question of the possible connections between the construction of a prediction function and statistics. Watching improving performances at classifying human faces does not tell much more than creating a massively non-linear function in high dimensions with nicely designed error penalties. Most of the talk droned about neural networks and their fitting by back-propagation and the variations on stochastic gradient descent. Not addressing much rather natural (?) questions about choice of functions at each level, of the number of levels, of the penalty term, or regulariser, and even less the reason why no sparsity is imposed on the structure, despite the humongous number of parameters involved. What came close [but not that close] to sparsity is the notion of dropout, which is a sort of purely automated culling of the nodes, and which was new to me. More like a sort of randomisation that turns the optimisation criterion in an average. Only at the end of the presentation more relevant questions emerged, presenting unsupervised learning as density estimation, the pivot being the generative features of (most) statistical models. And GANs of course. But nonetheless missing an explanation as to why models with massive numbers of parameters can be considered in this setting and not in standard statistics. (One slide about deterministic auto-encoders was somewhat puzzling in that it seemed to repeat the “fiducial mistake”.)
