Luo and Tjelmeland just arXived a paper on a new version of multiple-try Metropolis Hastings, the addendum being in defining the additional proposed copies via a dependence graph like (a) above, with one version from the target and all others from operational and conditional proposal kernels. Respecting the dependence graph, as in (b). As I did, you may then wonder where both the graph and the conditional do come from. Which reminds me of the pseudo-posteriors of Carlin and Chib (1995), even though this is not terribly connected. Green (1995).) (But not disconnected either since the authors mention But, given the graph, following a Gibbs scheme, one of the 17 nodes is chosen as generated from the target, using the proper conditional on that index [which is purely artificial from the point of view of the original simulation problem!]. As noted above, the graph is an issue, but since it is artificial, it can be devised to either allow for quasi-independence between the proposed values or on the opposite to induce long range dependence, which corresponds to conducting multiple MCMC steps before reaching the end nodes, a feature that is very appealing in my opinion. And reminds me of prefetching. (As I am listening to Nicolas Chopin’s lecture in Warwick at the moment, there also seems to be a connection with pMCMC.) Still, I remain unclear as to the devising of the graph of dependent proposals, as its depth should be somehow connected with the mixing properties of the original proposal. Gains in convergence may thus come at a high cost at the construction stage.
Archive for subsampling
more multiple proposal MCMC
Posted in Books, Statistics with tags delayed rejection sampling, directed acyclic graphs, Gibbs sampler, multiple-try Metropolis algorithm, parallelisation, prefetching, pseudo-posterior, subsampling on July 26, 2018 by xi'anminibatch acceptance for Metropolis-Hastings
Posted in Books, Statistics with tags artificial intelligence, batch sampling, fiducial distribution, Metropolis-Hastings algorithm, subsampling, Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence on January 12, 2018 by xi'anAn arXival that appeared last July by Seita, Pan, Chen, and Canny, and that relates to my current interest in speeding up MCMC. And to 2014 papers by Korattikara et al., and Bardenet et al. Published in Uncertainty in AI by now. The authors claim that their method requires less data per iteration than earlier ones…
“Our test is applicable when the variance (over data samples) of the log probability ratio between the proposal and the current state is less than one.”
By test, the authors mean a mini-batch formulation of the Metropolis-Hastings acceptance ratio in the (special) setting of iid data. First they use Barker’s version of the acceptance probability instead of Metropolis’. Second, they use a Gaussian approximation to the distribution of the logarithm of the Metropolis ratio for the minibatch, while the Barker acceptance step corresponds to comparing a logistic perturbation of the logarithm of the Metropolis ratio against zero. Which amounts to compare the logarithm of the Metropolis ratio for the minibatch, perturbed by a logistic minus Normal variate. (The cancellation of the Normal in eqn (13) is a form of fiducial fallacy, where the Normal variate has two different meanings. In other words, the difference of two Normal variates is not equal to zero.) However, the next step escapes me as the authors seek to optimise the distribution of this logistic minus Normal variate. Which I thought was uniquely defined as such a difference. Another constraint is that the estimated variance of the log-likelihood ratio gets below one. (Why one?) The argument is that the average of the individual log-likelihoods is approximately Normal by virtue of the Central Limit Theorem. Even when randomised. While the illustrations on a Gaussian mixture and on a logistic regression demonstrate huge gains in computational time, it is unclear to me to which amount one can trust the approximation for a given model and sample size…
likelihood inflating sampling algorithm
Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags BART, Canada, consensus Monte Carlo, importance sampling, likelihood function, Monte Carlo Statistical Methods, scaling, subsampling, University of Toronto on May 24, 2016 by xi'an
My friends from Toronto Radu Craiu and Jeff Rosenthal have arXived a paper along with Reihaneh Entezari on MCMC scaling for large datasets, in the spirit of Scott et al.’s (2013) consensus Monte Carlo. They devised an likelihood inflated algorithm that brings a novel perspective to the problem of large datasets. This question relates to earlier approaches like consensus Monte Carlo, but also kernel and Weierstrass subsampling, already discussed on this blog, as well as current research I am conducting with my PhD student Changye Wu. The approach by Entezari et al. is somewhat similar to consensus Monte Carlo and the other solutions in that they consider an inflated (i.e., one taken to the right power) likelihood based on a subsample, with the full sample being recovered by importance sampling. Somewhat unsurprisingly this approach leads to a less dispersed estimator than consensus Monte Carlo (Theorem 1). And the paper only draws a comparison with that sub-sampling method, rather than covering other approaches to the problem, maybe because this is the most natural connection, one approach being the k-th power of the other approach.
“…we will show that [importance sampling] is unnecessary in many instances…” (p.6)
An obvious question that stems from the approach is the call for importance sampling, since the numerator of the importance sampler involves the full likelihood which is unavailable in most instances when sub-sampled MCMC is required. I may have missed the part of the paper where the above statement is discussed, but the only realistic example discussed therein is the Bayesian regression tree (BART) of Chipman et al. (1998). Which indeed constitutes a challenging if one-dimensional example, but also one that requires delicate tuning that leads to cancelling importance weights but which may prove delicate to extrapolate to other models.
MCMskv #1 [room with a view]
Posted in Mountains, pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags airbnb, asynchronous algorithms, Bayesian variable selection, big data, computational complexity, determinism, Laplace's Demon, Lenzerheide, MCMC convergence, MCMskv, subsampling, Switzerland on January 6, 2016 by xi'an
That’s it!, MCMskv has now started! We hold our round-table Monday night, which ended with most of my interventions revolving about the importance of models. And of the fact that models are always approximate (and wrong), hence that uncertainty and uncertainty ascertainment is paramount. Even more with large datasets and 
high-dimensional models. Apologies to the audience if I sounded like running on a very short loop. (And maybe also for the round-table to keep them from their dinner!) Still, I got some items for reflection out of this discussion, including the notion that big data is usually and inappropriately associated with an impression of completeness that is almost deterministic in a Laplacian sense. Namely that the available data for, say, all Facebook users, seems to allow us (or The Machine) to play Laplace’s Demon. And thus forgoes the need for uncertainty and uncertainty ascertainment. Which obviously clashes with the issues of poor data, inappropriate models, and time or space stationarity of the available information.
Two more computing-related notions that came out the discussion [for me] are asynchronicity (in the sense explored by Terenin et al. a few months ago) and subsampling, The later seems to mean many things, judging from the discussion from the panel and the audience. For me, it corresponded to the ability (or inability) to handle only part of the available data to simulate the posterior associated with this available data.
The first talk on Tuesday morning was the plenary talk by Michael Jordan about his incorporation of complexity constraints on the convergence of an MCMC variable selection algorithm. (I though I had commented this paper in the past on the ‘Og but apparently I did not!) This was quite interesting, with ultra-fast convergence of the sampler. The talk was alas made harder to follow because of a cameraman standing in front of most of the audience for the entire time, as in the above picture. (I also noticed the interesting randomness of the light panels, who all display different patterns of dots, maybe random enough to satisfy a randomness test!) Another if irrelevant annoying fact was that I discovered upon arrival that my airbnb rental was located 8 kilometres away from the conference location, in a completely different town! Thankfully, we had rented a car [for 5] which saved the day (and even more the night!).
ergodicity of approximate MCMC chains with applications to large datasets
Posted in pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags ABC-MCMC, accelerated ABC, Approximate Bayesian computation, austerity sampling, ergodicity, MCMC, Metropolis-Hastings algorithms, Monte Carlo Statistical Methods, Natesh Pillai, subsampling, Wasserstein distance on August 31, 2015 by xi'an
Another arXived paper I read on my way to Warwick! And yet another paper written by my friend Natesh Pillai (and his co-author Aaron Smith, from Ottawa). The goal of the paper is to study the ergodicity and the degree of approximation of the true posterior distribution of approximate MCMC algorithms that recently flourished as an answer to “Big Data” issues… [Comments below are about the second version of this paper.] One of the most curious results in the paper is the fact that the approximation may prove better than the original kernel, in terms of computing costs! If asymptotically in the computing cost. There also are acknowledged connections with the approximative MCMC kernel of Pierre Alquier, Neal Friel, Richard Everitt and A Boland, briefly mentioned in an earlier post.
The paper starts with a fairly theoretical part, to follow with an application to austerity sampling [and, in the earlier version of the paper, to the Hoeffding bounds of Bardenet et al., both discussed earlier on the ‘Og, to exponential random graphs (the paper being rather terse on the description of the subsampling mechanism), to stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (by Max Welling and Yee-Whye Teh), and to ABC-MCMC]. The assumptions are about the transition kernels of a reference Markov kernel and of one associated with the approximation, imposing some bounds on the Wasserstein distance between those kernels, K and K’. Results being generic, there is no constraint as to how K is chosen or on how K’ is derived from K. Except in Lemma 3.6 and in the application section, where the same proposal kernel L is used for both Metropolis-Hastings algorithms K and K’. While I understand this makes for an easier coupling of the kernels, this also sounds like a restriction to me in that modifying the target begs for a similar modification in the proposal, if only because the tails they are a-changin’…
In the case of subsampling the likelihood to gain computation time (as discussed by Korattikara et al. and by Bardenet et al.), the austerity algorithm as described in Algorithm 2 is surprising as the average of the sampled data log-densities and the log-transform of the remainder of the Metropolis-Hastings probability, which seem unrelated, are compared until they are close enough. I also find hard to derive from the different approximation theorems bounding exceedance probabilities a rule to decide on the subsampling rate as a function of the overall sample size and of the computing cost. (As a side if general remark, I remain somewhat reserved about the subsampling idea, given that it requires the entire dataset to be available at every iteration. This makes parallel implementations rather difficult to contemplate.)
