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Add section about Pathfinder diagnostic and using for inits #833
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@@ -25,3 +25,29 @@ evaluations, with greater reductions for more challenging posteriors. | |
While the evaluations in @zhang_pathfinder:2022 found that | ||
single-path and multi-path Pathfinder outperform ADVI for most of the models in the PosteriorDB evaluation set, | ||
we recognize the need for further experiments on a wider range of models. | ||
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## Diagnosing Pathfinder | ||
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Pathfinder diagnoses the accuracy of the approximation by computing the density ratio of the true posterior and | ||
the approximation and using Pareto-$\hat{k}$ diagnostic (Vehtari et al., 2024) to assess whether these ratios can | ||
be used to improve the approximation via resmapling. /, the | ||
There was a problem hiding this comment. Choose a reason for hiding this commentThe reason will be displayed to describe this comment to others. Learn more. resmapling is misspelled. I don't know what the / is doing here---should this be a different character? |
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normalization for the posterior can be estimated reliably (Section 3, Vehtari et al., 2024), which is the | ||
first requirement for reliable resampling. If estimated Pareto-$\hat{k}$ for the ratios is smaller than 0.7, | ||
there is still need to further diagnose importance sampling estimates by taking into account also the expetant | ||
There was a problem hiding this comment. Choose a reason for hiding this commentThe reason will be displayed to describe this comment to others. Learn more. I don't know the word "expetant"---looks like it's Latin. Can we just write this in English? |
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function (Section 2.2, Vehtari et al., 2024). If estimated Pareto-$\hat{k}$ is larger than 0.7, then the | ||
estimate for the normalization is unreliable and any Mote Carlo estimate may have a big error. The resampled draws | ||
can still contain some useful information about the location and shape of the posterior which can be used in early | ||
parts of Bayesian workflow (Gelman et al, 2020). | ||
There was a problem hiding this comment. Choose a reason for hiding this commentThe reason will be displayed to describe this comment to others. Learn more. All of these should get turned into citations. |
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## Using Pathfinder for initializing MCMC | ||
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If estimated Pareto-$\hat{k}$ for the ratios is smaller than 0.7, the resampled posterior draws are almost as | ||
good for initializing MCMC as would indepepent draws from the posterior be. If estimated Pareto-$\hat{k}$ for the | ||
ratios is larger than 0.7, the Pathfinder draws are not reliable for posterior inference directly, but they are still | ||
very likely better for initializing MCMC than random draws from an arbitrary pre-defined distribution (e.g. uniform from | ||
-2 to 2 used by Stan by default). If Pareto-$\hat{k}$ is larger than 0.7, it is likely that one of the ratios is much bigger | ||
than others and the default resampling with replacement would produce copies of one unique draw. For initializing several | ||
Markov chains, it is better to use resampling without replacement to guarantee unique initialization for each chain. At the | ||
moment Stan allows turning off the resampling completely, and then the resampling without replacement can be done outside of | ||
Stan. | ||
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We should use actual references here like "@zhang_pathfinder:2022"