论文标题
Nuzz:一般模型的数值曲折ZAG采样
NuZZ: numerical Zig-Zag sampling for general models
论文作者
论文摘要
马尔可夫链蒙特卡洛(MCMC)是计算统计中的关键算法,随着数据集的增长和模型的增长越来越复杂,许多流行的MCMC算法在计算上变得过于昂贵,无法实用。通过基于分段确定性马尔可夫流程(PDMP)的MCMC算法的开发,在此问题上取得了最新进展,这可以设计为不可逆的过程,这些过程可以以独立于数据的规模而设计为收敛的速率。虽然可以理解的是,遵循这些结果,虽然有一系列的理论研究激增,但PDMP到目前为止仅针对可以界定某些梯度的模型实施,这在许多统计环境中是不可能的。为了关注ZIG-ZAG过程,我们介绍了数值Zig-Zag(Nuzz)算法,该算法适用于一般统计模型,而无需对数log后部梯度的界限。这使我们能够对以下几个数字实验进行:(i)锯齿形动力学在具有常见挑战性特征的某些测试问题上的表现; (ii)目标和采样分布之间的误差如何演变为包括NUZZ在内的不同MCMC算法的计算工作的函数。此外,由于NUZZ算法的细节,我们能够根据用户指定的Nuzz的数值公差,在确切的后部及其数值扰动对应物之间的瓦斯坦斯坦距离上有明确的束缚。
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a key algorithm in computational statistics, and as datasets grow larger and models grow more complex, many popular MCMC algorithms become too computationally expensive to be practical. Recent progress has been made on this problem through development of MCMC algorithms based on Piecewise Deterministic Markov Processes (PDMPs), irreversible processes that can be engineered to converge at a rate which is independent of the size of data. While there has understandably been a surge of theoretical studies following these results, PDMPs have so far only been implemented for models where certain gradients can be bounded, which is not possible in many statistical contexts. Focusing on the Zig-Zag process, we present the Numerical Zig-Zag (NuZZ) algorithm, which is applicable to general statistical models without the need for bounds on the gradient of the log posterior. This allows us to perform numerical experiments on: (i) how the Zig-Zag dynamics behaves on some test problems with common challenging features; and (ii) how the error between the target and sampled distributions evolves as a function of computational effort for different MCMC algorithms including NuZZ. Moreover, due to the specifics of the NuZZ algorithms, we are able to give an explicit bound on the Wasserstein distance between the exact posterior and its numerically perturbed counterpart in terms of the user-specified numerical tolerances of NuZZ.