Title
Efficient Bayesian Synthetic Likelihood With Whitening Transformations
Abstract
Likelihood-free methods are an established approach for performing approximate Bayesian inference for models with intractable likelihood functions. However, they can be computationally demanding. Bayesian synthetic likelihood (BSL) is a popular such method that approximates the likelihood function of the summary statistic with a known, tractable distribution-typically Gaussian-and then performs statistical inference using standard likelihood-based techniques. However, as the number of summary statistics grows, the number of model simulations required to accurately estimate the covariance matrix for this likelihood rapidly increases. This poses a significant challenge for the application of BSL, especially in cases where model simulation is expensive. In this article, we propose whitening BSL (wBSL)-an efficient BSL method that uses approximate whitening transformations to decorrelate the summary statistics at each algorithm iteration. We show empirically that this can reduce the number of model simulations required to implement BSL by more than an order of magnitude, without much loss of accuracy. We explore a range of whitening procedures and demonstrate the performance of wBSL on a range of simulated and real modeling scenarios from ecology and biology. for this article are available online.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1080/10618600.2021.1979012
JOURNAL OF COMPUTATIONAL AND GRAPHICAL STATISTICS
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Approximate Bayesian computation, Covariance matrix estimation, likelihood-free inference, Markov chain Monte Carlo, Shrinkage estimation
Journal
31
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
1
1061-8600
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jacob W. Priddle100.34
S. A. Sisson24613.94
David T. Frazier300.34
Ian Turner41016122.29
Christopher Drovandi500.34