Decision-Making with Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes
University of California, Berkeley(加州大学伯克利分校);Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub(陈-扎克伯格生物中心);Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard(麻省总医院、麻省理工学院和哈佛大学拉根研究所);University of Michigan(密歇根大学)
Romain Lopez, Pierre Boyeau, Nir Yosef, Michael I. Jordan, Jeffrey Regier
发表信息:
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 2020
To make decisions based on a model fit with auto-encoding variational Bayes (AEVB), practitioners often let the variational distribution serve as a surrogate for the posterior distribution. This approach yields biased estimates of the expected risk, and therefore leads to poor decisions for two reasons. First, the model fit with AEVB may not equal the underlying data distribution. Second, the variational distribution may not equal the posterior distribution under the fitted model. We explore how fitting the variational distribution based on several objective functions other than the ELBO, while continuing to fit the generative model based on the ELBO, affects the quality of downstream decisions. For the probabilistic principal component analysis model, we investigate how importance sampling error, as well as the bias of the model parameter estimates, varies across several approximate posteriors when used as proposal distributions. Our theoretical results suggest that a posterior approximation distinct from the variational distribution should be used for making decisions. Motivated by these theoretical results, we propose learning several approximate proposals for the best model and combining them using multiple importance sampling for decision-making. In addition to toy examples, we present a full-fledged case study of single-cell RNA sequencing. In this challenging instance of multiple hypothesis testing, our proposed approach surpasses the current state of the art.
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University of California, Berkeley(加州大学伯克利分校);Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard(麻省总医院、麻省理工学院与哈佛大学拉根研究所);Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub(陈·扎克伯格生物中心)
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Institut Polytechnique de Paris(巴黎综合理工学院);Université Paris-Saclay(巴黎萨克雷大学);Aix Marseille University(艾克斯-马赛大学)
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The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology(香港科技大学);The Education University of Hong Kong(香港教育大学)
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