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Register a new userNeural Empirical Bayes: Source Distribution Estimation and its Applications to Simulation-Based Inference
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We revisit empirical Bayes in the absence of a tractable likelihood function, as is typical in scientific domains relying on computer simulations. We investigate how the empirical Bayesian can make use of neural density estimators first to use all noise-corrupted observations to estimate a prior or source distribution over uncorrupted samples, and then to perform single-observation posterior inference using the fitted source distribution. We propose an approach based on the direct maximization of the log-marginal likelihood of the observations, examining both biased and de-biased estimators, and comparing to variational approaches. We find that, up to symmetries, a neural empirical Bayes approach recovers ground truth source distributions. With the learned source distribution in hand, we show the applicability to likelihood-free inference and examine the quality of the resulting posterior estimates. Finally, we demonstrate the applicability of Neural Empirical Bayes on an inverse problem from collider physics.
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Many domains of science have developed complex simulations to describe phenomena of interest. While these simulations provide high-fidelity models, they are poorly suited for inference and lead to challenging inverse problems. We review the rapidly developing field of simulation-based inference and identify the forces giving new momentum to the field. Finally, we describe how the frontier is expanding so that a broad audience can appreciate the profound change these developments may have on science.
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Neural Network based controllers hold enormous potential to learn complex, high-dimensional functions. However, they are prone to overfitting and unwarranted extrapolations. PAC Bayes is a generalized framework which is more resistant to overfitting and that yields performance bounds that hold with arbitrarily high probability even on the unjustified extrapolations. However, optimizing to learn such a function and a bound is intractable for complex tasks. In this work, we propose a method to simultaneously learn such a function and estimate performance bounds that scale organically to high-dimensions, non-linear environments without making any explicit assumptions about the environment. We build our approach on a parallel that we draw between the formulations called ELBO and PAC Bayes when the risk metric is negative log likelihood. Through our experiments on multiple high dimensional MuJoCo locomotion tasks, we validate the correctness of our theory, show its ability to generalize better, and investigate the factors that are important for its learning. The code for all the experiments is available at https://bit.ly/2qv0JjA.
Circular variables arise in a multitude of data-modelling contexts ranging from robotics to the social sciences, but they have been largely overlooked by the machine learning community. This paper partially redresses this imbalance by extending some standard probabilistic modelling tools to the circular domain. First we introduce a new multivariate distribution over circular variables, called the multivariate Generalised von Mises (mGvM) distribution. This distribution can be constructed by restricting and renormalising a general multivariate Gaussian distribution to the unit hyper-torus. Previously proposed multivariate circular distributions are shown to be special cases of this construction. Second, we introduce a new probabilistic model for circular regression, that is inspired by Gaussian Processes, and a method for probabilistic principal component analysis with circular hidden variables. These models can leverage standard modelling tools (e.g. covariance functions and methods for automatic relevance determination). Third, we show that the posterior distribution in these models is a mGvM distribution which enables development of an efficient variational free-energy scheme for performing approximate inference and approximate maximum-likelihood learning.
Empirical Bayes methods have been around for a long time and have a wide range of applications. These methods provide a way in which historical data can be aggregated to provide estimates of the posterior mean. This thesis revisits some of the empirical Bayesian methods and develops new applications. We first look at a linear empirical Bayes estimator and apply it on ranking and symbolic data. Next, we consider Tweedies formula and show how it can be applied to analyze a microarray dataset. The application of the formula is simplified with the Pearson system of distributions. Saddlepoint approximations enable us to generalize several results in this direction. The results show that the proposed methods perform well in applications to real data sets.
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