Since the mid-2000s, there has been a resurrection of interest in modern modifications of fiducial inference. To date, the main computational tool to extract a generalized fiducial distribution is Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). We propose an alternative way of computing a generalized fiducial distribution that could be used in complex situations. In particular, to overcome the difficulty when the unnormalized fiducial density (needed for MCMC), we design a fiducial autoencoder (FAE). The fitted autoencoder is used to generate generalized fiducial samples of the unknown parameters. To increase accuracy, we then apply an approximate fiducial computation (AFC) algorithm, by rejecting samples that when plugged into a decoder do not replicate the observed data well enough. Our numerical experiments show the effectiveness of our FAE-based inverse solution and the excellent coverage performance of the AFC corrected FAE solution.
While linear mixed modeling methods are foundational concepts introduced in any statistical education, adequate general methods for interval estimation involving models with more than a few variance components are lacking, especially in the unbalanced setting. Generalized fiducial inference provides a possible framework that accommodates this absence of methodology. Under the fabric of generalized fiducial inference along with sequential Monte Carlo methods, we present an approach for interval estimation for both balanced and unbalanced Gaussian linear mixed models. We compare the proposed met…
We introduce a novel approach to inference on parameters that take values in a Riemannian manifold embedded in a Euclidean space. Parameter spaces of this form are ubiquitous across many fields, including chemistry, physics, computer graphics, and geology. This new approach uses generalized fiducial inference to obtain a posterior-like distribution on the manifold, without needing to know a parameterization that maps the constrained space to an unconstrained Euclidean space. The proposed methodology, called the constrained generalized fiducial distribution (CGFD), is obtained by using mathemat…
It is not unusual for a data analyst to encounter data sets distributed across several computers. This can happen for reasons such as privacy concerns, efficiency of likelihood evaluations, or just the sheer size of the whole data set. This presents new challenges to statisticians as even computing simple summary statistics such as the median becomes computationally challenging. Furthermore, if other advanced statistical methods are desired, novel computational strategies are needed. In this paper we propose a new approach for distributed analysis of massive data that is suitable for generaliz…
Fiducial inference was introduced in the first half of the 20th century by Fisher (1935) as a means to get a posterior-like distribution for a parameter without having to arbitrarily define a prior. While the method originally fell out of favor due to non-exactness issues in multivariate cases, the method has garnered renewed interest in the last decade. This is partly due to the development of generalized fiducial inference, which is a fiducial perspective on generalized confidence intervals: a method used to find approximate confidence distributions. In this chapter, we illuminate the useful…
The majority of the statisticians concluded many decades ago that fiducial inference was nonsensical to them. Hannig et al. (2016) and others have, however, contributed to a renewed interest and focus. Fiducial inference is similar to Bayesian analysis, but without requiring a prior. The prior information is replaced by assuming a particular data generating equation. Berger (1985) explains that Bayesian analysis and statistical decision theory are in harmony. Taraldsen and Lindqvist (2013) show that fiducial theory and statistical decision theory also play well together. The purpose of this te…
A principle is modified that underlies the theory of organic fiducial inference as this theory was presented in an earlier paper. This modification, which is arguably a natural one to make, allows Bayesian inference to sometimes have a minor role within the theory in question and, as a consequence, allows more information from the data to be incorporated into the way a full conditional fiducial density is defined in certain cases. The new version of the principle concerned is applied to examples that were analysed previously using the older version of this principle.
Fiducial Inference, introduced by Fisher in the 1930s, has a long history, which at times aroused passionate disagreements. However, its application has been largely confined to relatively simple parametric problems. In this paper, we present what might be the first time fiducial inference, as generalized by Hannig et al. (2016), is systematically applied to estimation of a nonparametric survival function under right censoring. We find that the resulting fiducial distribution gives rise to surprisingly good statistical procedures applicable to both one sample and two sample problems. In partic…
As a classical problem, covariance estimation has drawn much attention from the statistical community for decades. Much work has been done under the frequentist and the Bayesian frameworks. Aiming to quantify the uncertainty of the estimators without having to choose a prior, we have developed a fiducial approach to the estimation of covariance matrix. Built upon the Fiducial Berstein-von Mises Theorem (Sonderegger and Hannig 2014), we show that the fiducial distribution of the covariate matrix is consistent under our framework. Consequently, the samples generated from this fiducial distributi…
Bayesian, frequentist and fiducial (BFF) inferences are much more congruous than they have been perceived historically in the scientific community (cf., Reid and Cox 2015; Kass 2011; Efron 1998). Most practitioners are probably more familiar with the two dominant statistical inferential paradigms, Bayesian inference and frequentist inference. The third, lesser known fiducial inference paradigm was pioneered by R.A. Fisher in an attempt to define an inversion procedure for inference as an alternative to Bayes' theorem. Although each paradigm has its own strengths and limitations subject to thei…
The aim of this paper is to firmly establish subjective fiducial inference as a rival to the more conventional schools of statistical inference, and to show that Fisher's intuition concerning the importance of the fiducial argument was correct. In this regard, methodology outlined in an earlier paper is modified, enhanced and extended to deal with general inferential problems in which various parameters are unknown. As a key part of what is put forward, the joint fiducial distribution of all the parameters of a given model is determined on the basis of the full conditional fiducial distributio…
In recent years the ultrahigh dimensional linear regression problem has attracted enormous attentions from the research community. Under the sparsity assumption most of the published work is devoted to the selection and estimation of the significant predictor variables. This paper studies a different but fundamentally important aspect of this problem: uncertainty quantification for parameter estimates and model choices. To be more specific, this paper proposes methods for deriving a probability density function on the set of all possible models, and also for constructing confidence intervals f…
A substantial generalisation is put forward of the theory of subjective fiducial inference as it was outlined in earlier papers. In particular, this theory is extended to deal with cases where the data are discrete or categorical rather than continuous, and cases where there was important pre-data knowledge about some or all of the model parameters. The system for directly expressing and then handling this pre-data knowledge, which is via what are referred to as global and local pre-data functions for the parameters concerned, is distinct from that which involves attempting to directly represe…
Due to their accuracies, methods based on ensembles of regression trees are a popular approach for making predictions. Some common examples include Bayesian additive regression trees, boosting and random forests. This paper focuses on honest random forests, which add honesty to the original form of random forests and are proved to have better statistical properties. The main contribution is a new method that quantifies the uncertainties of the estimates and predictions produced by honest random forests. The proposed method is based on the generalized fiducial methodology, and provides a fiduci…
To train an inference network jointly with a deep generative topic model, making it both scalable to big corpora and fast in out-of-sample prediction, we develop Weibull hybrid autoencoding inference (WHAI) for deep latent Dirichlet allocation, which infers posterior samples via a hybrid of stochastic-gradient MCMC and autoencoding variational Bayes. The generative network of WHAI has a hierarchy of gamma distributions, while the inference network of WHAI is a Weibull upward-downward variational autoencoder, which integrates a deterministic-upward deep neural network, and a stochastic-downward…
Standard penalized methods of variable selection and parameter estimation rely on the magnitude of coefficient estimates to decide which variables to include in the final model. However, coefficient estimates are unreliable when the design matrix is collinear. To overcome this challenge an entirely new perspective on variable selection is presented within a generalized fiducial inference framework. This new procedure is able to effectively account for linear dependencies among subsets of covariates in a high-dimensional setting where $p$ can grow almost exponentially in $n$, as well as in the …
Fiducial inference, as generalized by Hannig et al. (2016), is applied to nonparametric g-modeling (Efron, 2016) in the discrete case. We propose a computationally efficient algorithm to sample from the fiducial distribution, and use the generated samples to construct point estimates and confidence intervals. We study the theoretical properties of the fiducial distribution and perform extensive simulations in various scenarios. The proposed approach yields good statistical performance in terms of the mean squared error of point estimators and the coverage of confidence intervals. Furthermore, …
In this paper, we introduce Deep Probabilistic Ensembles (DPEs), a scalable technique that uses a regularized ensemble to approximate a deep Bayesian Neural Network (BNN). We do so by incorporating a KL divergence penalty term into the training objective of an ensemble, derived from the evidence lower bound used in variational inference. We evaluate the uncertainty estimates obtained from our models for active learning on visual classification. Our approach steadily improves upon active learning baselines as the annotation budget is increased.
In this paper, we propose a deep probabilistic multi-view model that is composed of a linear multi-view layer based on probabilistic canonical correlation analysis (CCA) description in the latent space together with deep generative networks as observation models. The network is designed to decompose the variations of all views into a shared latent representation and a set of view-specific components where the shared latent representation is intended to describe the common underlying sources of variation among the views. An efficient variational inference procedure is developed that approximate…
Over-parameterized models, such as DeepNets and ConvNets, form a class of models that are routinely adopted in a wide variety of applications, and for which Bayesian inference is desirable but extremely challenging. Variational inference offers the tools to tackle this challenge in a scalable way and with some degree of flexibility on the approximation, but for over-parameterized models this is challenging due to the over-regularization property of the variational objective. Inspired by the literature on kernel methods, and in particular on structured approximations of distributions of random …
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；Alan Turing Institute（艾伦·图灵研究所）；University of Sevilla（塞维利亚大学）
Deep Gaussian Processes (DGPs) are hierarchical generalizations of Gaussian Processes that combine well calibrated uncertainty estimates with the high flexibility of multilayer models. One of the biggest challenges with these models is that exact inference is intractable. The current state-of-the-art inference method, Variational Inference (VI), employs a Gaussian approximation to the posterior distribution. This can be a potentially poor unimodal approximation of the generally multimodal posterior. In this work, we provide evidence for the non-Gaussian nature of the posterior and we apply the…
CREST（CREST（经济与统计研究中心））；ENSAE（ENSAE（国立统计与经济管理学院））；Institut Polytechnique de Paris（巴黎理工学院）
Variational inference is becoming more and more popular for approximating intractable posterior distributions in Bayesian statistics and machine learning. Meanwhile, a few recent works have provided theoretical justification and new insights on deep neural networks for estimating smooth functions in usual settings such as nonparametric regression. In this paper, we show that variational inference for sparse deep learning retains the same generalization properties than exact Bayesian inference. In particular, we highlight the connection between estimation and approximation theories via the clas…
We present Spectral Inference Networks, a framework for learning eigenfunctions of linear operators by stochastic optimization. Spectral Inference Networks generalize Slow Feature Analysis to generic symmetric operators, and are closely related to Variational Monte Carlo methods from computational physics. As such, they can be a powerful tool for unsupervised representation learning from video or graph-structured data. We cast training Spectral Inference Networks as a bilevel optimization problem, which allows for online learning of multiple eigenfunctions. We show results of training Spectral…
Sparse deep learning aims to address the challenge of huge storage consumption by deep neural networks, and to recover the sparse structure of target functions. Although tremendous empirical successes have been achieved, most sparse deep learning algorithms are lacking of theoretical support. On the other hand, another line of works have proposed theoretical frameworks that are computationally infeasible. In this paper, we train sparse deep neural networks with a fully Bayesian treatment under spike-and-slab priors, and develop a set of computationally efficient variational inferences via cont…
The development of statistical methods for valid and efficient probabilistic inference without prior distributions has a long history. Fisher's fiducial inference is perhaps the most famous of these attempts. We argue that, despite its seemingly prior-free formulation, fiducial and its various extensions are not prior-free and, therefore, do not meet the requirements for prior-free probabilistic inference. In contrast, the inferential model (IM) framework is genuinely prior-free and is shown to be a promising new method for generating both valid and efficient probabilistic inference. With a br…
One formulation of forensic identification of source problems is to determine the source of trace evidence, for instance, glass fragments found on a suspect for a crime. The current state of the science is to compute a Bayes factor (BF) comparing the marginal distribution of measurements of trace evidence under two competing propositions for whether or not the unknown source evidence originated from a specific source. The obvious problem with such an approach is the ability to tailor the prior distributions (placed on the features/parameters of the statistical model for the measurements of tra…
Statistical inference as a formal scientific method to covert experience to knowledge has proven to be elusively difficult. While frequentist and Bayesian methodologies have been accepted in the contemporary era as two dominant schools of thought, it has been a good part of the last hundred years to see growing interests in development of more sound methods, both philosophically, in terms of scientific meaning of inference, and mathematically, in terms of exactness and efficiency. These include Fisher's fiducial argument, the Dempster-Shafe theory of belief functions, generalized fiducial, Con…
This paper introduces to readers the new concept and methodology of confidence distribution and the modern-day distributional inference in statistics. This discussion should be of interest to people who would like to go into the depth of the statistical inference methodology and to utilize distribution estimators in practice. We also include in the discussion the topic of generalized fiducial inference, a special type of modern distributional inference, and relate it to the concept of confidence distribution. Several real data examples are also provided for practitioners. We hope that the sele…
In this discussion we demonstrate that fiducial distributions provide a natural example of an inference paradigm that does not obey Strong Likelihood Principle while still satisfying the Weak Conditionality Principle. [arXiv:1302.7021]
We develop a framework for generalized variational inference in infinite-dimensional function spaces and use it to construct a method termed Gaussian Wasserstein inference (GWI). GWI leverages the Wasserstein distance between Gaussian measures on the Hilbert space of square-integrable functions in order to determine a variational posterior using a tractable optimisation criterion and avoids pathologies arising in standard variational function space inference. An exciting application of GWI is the ability to use deep neural networks in the variational parametrisation of GWI, combining their sup…
We marry ideas from deep neural networks and approximate Bayesian inference to derive a generalised class of deep, directed generative models, endowed with a new algorithm for scalable inference and learning. Our algorithm introduces a recognition model to represent approximate posterior distributions, and that acts as a stochastic encoder of the data. We develop stochastic back-propagation -- rules for back-propagation through stochastic variables -- and use this to develop an algorithm that allows for joint optimisation of the parameters of both the generative and recognition model. We demon…
UCLA（加州大学洛杉矶分校）；Northwestern Kellogg School of Management（西北大学凯洛格管理学院）；University of Chicago（芝加哥大学）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）；Santa Fe Institute（圣塔菲研究所）
There has been significant interest in the use of fully-connected graphical models and deep-structured graphical models for the purpose of structured inference. However, fully-connected and deep-structured graphical models have been largely explored independently, leaving the unification of these two concepts ripe for exploration. A fundamental challenge with unifying these two types of models is in dealing with computational complexity. In this study, we investigate the feasibility of unifying fully-connected and deep-structured models in a computationally tractable manner for the purpose of …
