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Register a new userUnbiased Bayes for Big Data: Paths of Partial Posteriors
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A key quantity of interest in Bayesian inference are expectations of functions with respect to a posterior distribution. Markov Chain Monte Carlo is a fundamental tool to consistently compute these expectations via averaging samples drawn from an approximate posterior. However, its feasibility is being challenged in the era of so called Big Data as all data needs to be processed in every iteration. Realising that such simulation is an unnecessarily hard problem if the goal is estimation, we construct a computationally scalable methodology that allows unbiased estimation of the required expectations -- without explicit simulation from the full posterior. The schemes variance is finite by construction and straightforward to control, leading to algorithms that are provably unbiased and naturally arrive at a desired error tolerance. This is achieved at an average computational complexity that is sub-linear in the size of the dataset and its free parameters are easy to tune. We demonstrate the utility and generality of the methodology on a range of common statistical models applied to large-scale benchmark and real-world datasets.
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Big Data is one of the major challenges of statistical science and has numerous consequences from algorithmic and theoretical viewpoints. Big Data always involve massive data but they also often include online data and data heterogeneity. Recently some statistical methods have been adapted to process Big Data, like linear regression models, clustering methods and bootstrapping schemes. Based on decision trees combined with aggregation and bootstrap ideas, random forests were introduced by Breiman in 2001. They are a powerful nonparametric statistical method allowing to consider in a single and versatile framework regression problems, as well as two-class and multi-class classification problems. Focusing on classification problems, this paper proposes a selective review of available proposals that deal with scaling random forests to Big Data problems. These proposals rely on parallel environments or on online adaptations of random forests. We also describe how related quantities -- such as out-of-bag error and variable importance -- are addressed in these methods. Then, we formulate various remarks for random forests in the Big Data context. Finally, we experiment five variants on two massive datasets (15 and 120 millions of observations), a simulated one as well as real world data. One variant relies on subsampling while three others are related to parallel implementations of random forests and involve either various adaptations of bootstrap to Big Data or to divide-and-conquer approaches. The fifth variant relates on online learning of random forests. These numerical experiments lead to highlight the relative performance of the different variants, as well as some of their limitations.
We develop an empirical Bayes (EB) algorithm for the matrix completion problems. The EB algorithm is motivated from the singular value shrinkage estimator for matrix means by Efron and Morris (1972). Since the EB algorithm is essentially the EM algorithm applied to a simple model, it does not require heuristic parameter tuning other than tolerance. Numerical results demonstrated that the EB algorithm achieves a good trade-off between accuracy and efficiency compared to existing algorithms and that it works particularly well when the difference between the number of rows and columns is large. Application to real data also shows the practical utility of the EB algorithm.
A common challenge in estimating parameters of probability density functions is the intractability of the normalizing constant. While in such cases maximum likelihood estimation may be implemented using numerical integration, the approach becomes computationally intensive. The score matching method of Hyvarinen [2005] avoids direct calculation of the normalizing constant and yields closed-form estimates for exponential families of continuous distributions over $mathbb{R}^m$. Hyvarinen [2007] extended the approach to distributions supported on the non-negative orthant, $mathbb{R}_+^m$. In this paper, we give a generalized form of score matching for non-negative data that improves estimation efficiency. As an example, we consider a general class of pairwise interaction models. Addressing an overlooked inexistence problem, we generalize the regularized score matching method of Lin et al. [2016] and improve its theoretical guarantees for non-negative Gaussian graphical models.
We present a novel condition, which we term the net- work nullspace property, which ensures accurate recovery of graph signals representing massive network-structured datasets from few signal values. The network nullspace property couples the cluster structure of the underlying network-structure with the geometry of the sampling set. Our results can be used to design efficient sampling strategies based on the network topology.
Several statistical models are given in the form of unnormalized densities, and calculation of the normalization constant is intractable. We propose estimation methods for such unnormalized models with missing data. The key concept is to combine imputation techniques with estimators for unnormalized models including noise contrastive estimation and score matching. In addition, we derive asymptotic distributions of the proposed estimators and construct confidence intervals. Simulation results with truncated Gaussian graphical models and the application to real data of wind direction reveal that the proposed methods effectively enable statistical inference with unnormalized models from missing data.
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