Our former Dauphine Master student Théo Voldoire (now PhD-ing at Harvard), along with Nicolas Chopin, Guillaume Rateau, and Robin Ryder (now at Imperial), arXived a month ago a paper with title Saddlepoint Monte Carlo and its Application to Exact Ecological Inference, essentially the outcome of his Master thesis last summer. Nicolas came to present the paper at our Mostly MC seminar. The motivating example is about vote transfers (to surviving candidates for a second round, as in the French presidential and deputorial elections) based on results from polling stations across rounds, which equates filling a contingency table with known margins, exploiting multiple tools like characteristic functions, inverse Fourier transform, its Monte Carlo version, pseudo-marginal MCMC, tilting, exponential families, quasi Monte Carlo! Which also reminded me of the time Reuven Rubinstein was occasionally visiting Paris, defending the cross entropy approach. Among multiple questions raised by this original approach to an “old” problem, one may think of the model misspecification issue that political analysts would not fail to raise, namely that the transfer estimates are based on multinomial models, that all models are wrong, &tc. We discussed briefly about this during the seminar, the suggestion being a predictive check by cross validation. The talk also brought to mind highly probable applications to privacy, and possibly to capture recapture.
Archive for quasi-Monte Carlo
Saddlepoint Monte Carlo and its application to vote transfers
Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags characteristic function, cross-entropy method, ecological models, exponential families, exponential tilting, French elections, French politics, marginalisation, presidential elections, pseudo-marginal MCMC, quasi-Monte Carlo, Reuven Rubinstein, saddlepoint on January 3, 2024 by xi'andropping a point
Posted in Statistics, University life with tags Illya Sobol, MCMC, MCQMC 2020, Monte Carlo error, pytorch, qMC, quasi-Monte Carlo, scipy, Sobol sequences on September 8, 2020 by xi'an“A discussion about whether to drop the initial point came up in the plenary tutorial of Fred Hickernell at MCQMC 2020 about QMCPy software for QMC. The issue has been discussed by the pytorch community , and the scipy community, which are both incorporating QMC methods.”
Art Owen recently arXived a paper entitled On dropping the first Sobol’ point in which he examines the impact of a common practice consisting in skipping the first point of a Sobol’ sequence when using quasi-Monte Carlo. By analogy with the burn-in practice for MCMC that aims at eliminating the biais due to the choice of the starting value. Art’s paper shows that by skipping just this one point the rate of convergence of some QMC estimates may drop by a factor, bringing the rate back to Monte Carlo values! As this applies to randomised scrambled Sobol sequences, this is quite amazing. The explanation centers on the suppression leaving one region of the hypercube unexplored, with an O(n⁻¹) error ensuing.
The above picture from the paper makes the case in a most obvious way: the mean squared error is not decreasing at the same rate for the no-drop and one-drop versions, since they are -3/2 and -1, respectively. The paper further “recommends against using roundnumber sample sizes and thinning QMC points.” Conclusion: QMC is not MC!
Optimization Monte Carlo: Efficient and embarrassingly parallel likelihood-free inference
Posted in Books, Statistics, Travel with tags ABC, embarassingly parallel, inverse cdf, Jacobian, London, Monte Carlo Statistical Methods, pseudo-random generator, quasi-Monte Carlo, simulation on December 16, 2015 by xi'an
Ted Meeds and Max Welling have not so recently written about an embarrassingly parallel approach to ABC that they call optimisation Monte Carlo. [Danke Ingmar for pointing out the reference to me.] They start from a rather innocuous rephrasing of the ABC posterior, writing the pseudo-observations as deterministic transforms of the parameter and of a vector of uniforms. Innocuous provided this does not involve an infinite number of uniforms, obviously. Then they suddenly switch to the perspective that, for a given uniform vector u, one should seek the parameter value θ that agrees with the observation y. A sort of Monte Carlo inverse regression: if
y=f(θ,u),
then invert this equation in θ. This is quite clever! Maybe closer to fiducial than true Bayesian statistics, since the prior does not occur directly [only as a weight p(θ)], but if this is manageable [and it all depends on the way f(θ,u) is constructed], this should perform better than ABC! After thinking about it a wee bit more in London, though, I realised this was close to impossible in the realistic examples I could think of. But I still like the idea and want to see if anything at all can be made of this…
“However, it is hard to detect if our optimization succeeded and we may therefore sometimes reject samples that should not have been rejected. Thus, one should be careful not to create a bias against samples u for which the optimization is difficult. This situation is similar to a sampler that will not mix to remote local optima in the posterior distribution.”
Now, the paper does not go that way but keeps the ε-ball approach as in regular ABC, to derive an approximation of the posterior density. For a while I was missing the difference between the centre of the ball and the inverse of the above equation, bottom of page 3. But then I realised the former was an approximation to the latter. When the authors discuss their approximation in terms of the error ε, I remain unconvinced by the transfer of the tolerance to the optimisation error, as those are completely different notions. This also applies to the use of a Jacobian in the weight, which seems out of place since this Jacobian appears in a term associated with (or replacing) the likelihood, f(θ,u), which is then multiplied by the prior p(θ). (Assuming a Jacobian exists, which is unclear when considering most simulation patterns use hard bounds and indicators.) When looking at the toy examples, it however makes sense to have a Jacobian since the selected θ’s are transforms of the u’s. And the p(θ)’s are simply importance weights correcting for the wrong target. Overall, the appeal of the method proposed in the paper remains unclear to me. Most likely because I did not spend enough time over it.
Latent Gaussian Models im Zürich [day 1]
Posted in R, Statistics with tags Havard Rue, latent Gaussian models, quasi-Monte Carlo, R, R-INLA, Zurich on February 5, 2011 by xi'an
An interesting first day (for me) at the Latent Gaussian Models workshop in Zürich. The workshop is obviously centred at the INLA approach, with Havard Rue giving a short course on Wednesday then a wide ranging tour of the applications and extensions of INLA this afternoon. Thanks to his efforts in making the method completely accessible for many models through an R package, using mode description commands like
inla(formula, family="weibull", data=Kidney, control.inla=list(h=0.001))
there is now a growing community of INLA users. As exemplified by the attendees to this workshop. Chris Holmes gave another of his inspirational talks this afternoon when defending the use of quasi-Monte Carlo methods in Bayes factor approximations. The model choice session this morning showed interesting directions, including a calibration of the Hellinger distance by Bernoulli distributions, while the application session this afternoon covered owls, bulls, and woolly mammoths. I even managed to speak about ABC model choice, Gaussian approximations of Ising models, stochastic volatility modelling, and grey codes for variable selection, before calling it a (full and fruitful) day!
