I used to code my MCMC using C. But I'd like to give PyMC a try.
Suppose X_n is the underlying state whose dynamics following a Markov chain and Y_n is the observed data. In particular,
Y_n has Poisson distribution with mean depending on X_n and a multidimensional unknown parameter theta
X_n | X_{n-1} has distribution depending on theta
How should I describe this model using PyMC?
Another question: I can find conjugate priors for theta but not for X_n. Is it possible to specify which posteriors are updated using conjugate priors and which using MCMC?
Here is an example of a state-space model in PyMC on the PyMC wiki. It basically involves populating a list and allowing PyMC to treat it as a container of PyMC nodes.
As for the second part of the question, you could certainly calculate some of your conjugate posteriors ahead of time and put them into the model. For example, if you observed binomial data x=4, n=10 you could insert a Beta node p = Beta('p', 5, 7) to represent that posterior (its really just a prior, as far as the model is concerned, but it is the posterior given data x). Then PyMC would draw a sample for this posterior at every iteration to be used wherever it is needed in the model.
Related
I'm trying to understand the variational inference module in tensorflow; I have a particular use case I'm hoping to use it for.
I want to make a custom distribution, the RV of which is a transformation of a vector of independent gamma RV's. This transformation removes one degree of freedom.
For simplicity's sake, let's consider the Dirichlet distribution. If x is an independent gamma vector with shape parameter vector a, then y = x / sum(x) is a dirichlet vector with the same shape vector, and sums to 1. Thus it loses 1 degree of freedom in the transformation.
Let's say I want to implement this distribution as a tfp.distributions.TransformedDistribution. Would that be possible? The Bijector class assumes implementation of both forward and inverse transformations, which, after the sum is integrated out, is no longer possible.
How would I go about implementing the Dirichlet in TransformedDistribution?
If my latent representation of variational autoencoder(VAE) is r, and my dataset is x, does vae's latent representation follows normalization based on r or x?
If r= 10, that means it has 10 means and variance (multi-gussain) and distribution comes from data whole data x?
Or r = 10 constructs one distribution based on r, and every sample try to follow this distribution
I'm confused about which one is correct
VAE constructs a mapping e(x) -> Z (encoder), and d(z) -> X (decoder). This means that every elements of your input space x will be mapped through an encoder e(x) into a single, r-dimensional Gaussian. It is not a "mixture", it is just a single gaussian with diagonal covariance matrix.
I'll add my 2 cents to #lejlot answer.
Your encoder in VAE will map your sample to a distribution, that in your case has 10 dimensions... that distribution is used to say "ok my best estimate of this property of this sample is mu, but I'm not too sure, so consider that it might have variance sigma"
Therefore, you have a distribution for each sample.
However, in order to make sampling easier in VAE, we ask the VAE to keep the distributions as close to a known one, that is the standard normal distribution (we know "where the distributions are located", if you check the latent space in a normal AE you will see that you will have groups far from eachother).
My questions are specific to https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.decomposition.PCA.html#sklearn.decomposition.PCA.
I don't understand why you square eigenvalues
https://github.com/scikit-learn/scikit-learn/blob/55bf5d9/sklearn/decomposition/pca.py#L444
here?
Also, explained_variance is not computed for new transformed data other than original data used to compute eigen-vectors. Is that not normally done?
pca = PCA(n_components=2, svd_solver='full')
pca.fit(X)
pca.transform(Y)
In this case, won't you separately calculate explained variance for data Y as well. For that purpose, I think we would have to use point 3 instead of using eigen-values.
Explained variance can be also computed by taking the variance of each axis in the transformed space and dividing by the total variance. Any reason that is not done here?
Answers to your questions:
1) The square roots of the eigenvalues of the scatter matrix (e.g. XX.T) are the singular values of X (see here: https://math.stackexchange.com/a/3871/536826). So you square them. Important: the initial matrix X should be centered (data has been preprocessed to have zero mean) in order for the above to hold.
2) Yes this is the way to go. explained_variance is computed based on the singular values. See point 1.
3) It's the same but in the case you describe you HAVE to project the data and then do additional computations. No need for that if you just compute it using the eigenvalues / singular values (see point 1 again for the connection between these two).
Finally, keep in mind that not everyone really wants to project the data. Someone can only get the eigenvalues and then immediately estimate the explained variance WITHOUT projecting the data. So that's the best gold standard way to do it.
EDIT 1:
Answer to edited Point 2
No. PCA is an unsupervised method. It only transforms the X data not the Y (labels).
Again, the explained variance can be computed fast, easily, and with half line of code using the eigenvalues/singular values OR as you said using the projected data e.g. estimating the covariance of the projected data, then variances of PCs will be in the diagonal.
I'm analysing longitudinal panel data, in which individuals transition between different states in a Markov chain. I'm modelling the transition rates between states using a series of multinomial logistic regressions. This means that I end up with a very large number of regression slopes.
For each regression slope, I obtain a posterior distribution (using WinBUGS). From the posterior distribution, we get the mean, standard deviation, and 95% credible interval associated with the slope in question.
The value I am ultimately interested in is the expected first passage time ('hitting time') through the Markov chain. This is a function of all the different predictor variables, and so is built from the many regression slopes produced by the multinomial logistic regressions.
A simple approach would be to take the mean of each posterior distribution as a point-estimate for each regression slope, and solve for the expected first passage time at a series of different values of the predictor variables. I have now done this, but it is potentially misleading because it doesn't show the uncertainty around the predicted values of expected first passage time.
My question is: how can I calculate a credible interval for the expected first passage time?
My first thought was to approximate the error via simulation, by sampling individual values for the regression slopes from each posterior distribution, obtaining the expected first passage time given those values, and then plotting the standard deviation of all these simulated values. However, I feel like (a) this would make a statistician scream and (b) it doesn't take into account the fact that different posterior distributions will be correlated (it samples from each one independently).
In WinBUGS, you can actually obtain the correlations between the posterior distributions. So if the simulation idea is appropriate, I could in theory simulate the regression slope coefficients incorporating these correlations.
Is there a more direct and less approximate way to find the uncertainty? Could I, for instance, use WinBUGS to find the posterior distribution of the expected first passage time for a given set of values of the predictor variables? Rather like the answer to this question: define a new node and monitor it. I would imagine defining a series of new nodes, where each one is for a different set of actual predictor values, and monitoring each one. Does this make good statistical sense?
Any thoughts about this would be really appreciated!
I've noticed that when using uniform distributions in pymc3, the sampler also scans over an _interval parameter as well unless a transform is specified for example:
with fitModel6:
normMu = pm.Uniform('normMu',lower=0,upper=1000)
will result in not only sampling over normMu, but also, normMu_interval:
trace plot of interval
trace plot of parameter
Normally, when I am using an uniform prior for scale parameter like a normalization, I will of course sample over the log interval. Is pymc3 handling this for me somehow?
Cheers
PyMC3 automatically applies transformations to bounded variables to put them on an unconstrained scale. The code for each transformation is here and a very brief discussion of the automatic transformation of variables is found in the official PyMC3 Tutorial.
Edit
In case the link breaks/moves again, here's the bulk of the info from the Tutorial
In order to sample models more efficiently, PyMC3 automatically transforms bounded RVs to be unbounded.
with pm.Model() as model:
x = pm.Uniform('x', lower=0, upper=1)`
When we look at the RVs of the model, we would expect to find x there, however:
In [16]: model.free_RVs
Out[16]: [x_interval__]
x_interval__ represents x transformed to accept parameter values between -inf and +inf. In the case of an upper and a lower bound, a LogOdds transform is applied. Sampling in this transformed space makes it easier for the sampler...