Simulation-based Inference for High-dimensional Data using Surjective Sequential Neural Likelihood Estimation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Dirmeier, Simon, Albert, Carlo, Perez-Cruz, Fernando
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Dirmeier, Simon
Albert, Carlo
Perez-Cruz, Fernando
author_facet Dirmeier, Simon
Albert, Carlo
Perez-Cruz, Fernando
contents Neural likelihood estimation methods for simulation-based inference can suffer from performance degradation when the modeled data is very high-dimensional or lies along a lower-dimensional manifold, which is due to the inability of the density estimator to accurately estimate a density function. We present Surjective Sequential Neural Likelihood (SSNL) estimation, a novel member in the family of methods for simulation-based inference (SBI). SSNL fits a dimensionality-reducing surjective normalizing flow model and uses it as a surrogate likelihood function, which allows for computational inference via Markov chain Monte Carlo or variational Bayes methods. Among other benefits, SSNL avoids the requirement to manually craft summary statistics for inference of high-dimensional data sets, since the lower-dimensional representation is computed simultaneously with learning the likelihood and without additional computational overhead. We evaluate SSNL on a wide variety of experiments, including two challenging real-world examples from the astrophysics and neuroscience literatures, and show that it either outperforms or is on par with state-of-the-art methods, making it an excellent off-the-shelf estimator for SBI for high-dimensional data sets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2308_01054
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Simulation-based Inference for High-dimensional Data using Surjective Sequential Neural Likelihood Estimation
Dirmeier, Simon
Albert, Carlo
Perez-Cruz, Fernando
Machine Learning
Methodology
Neural likelihood estimation methods for simulation-based inference can suffer from performance degradation when the modeled data is very high-dimensional or lies along a lower-dimensional manifold, which is due to the inability of the density estimator to accurately estimate a density function. We present Surjective Sequential Neural Likelihood (SSNL) estimation, a novel member in the family of methods for simulation-based inference (SBI). SSNL fits a dimensionality-reducing surjective normalizing flow model and uses it as a surrogate likelihood function, which allows for computational inference via Markov chain Monte Carlo or variational Bayes methods. Among other benefits, SSNL avoids the requirement to manually craft summary statistics for inference of high-dimensional data sets, since the lower-dimensional representation is computed simultaneously with learning the likelihood and without additional computational overhead. We evaluate SSNL on a wide variety of experiments, including two challenging real-world examples from the astrophysics and neuroscience literatures, and show that it either outperforms or is on par with state-of-the-art methods, making it an excellent off-the-shelf estimator for SBI for high-dimensional data sets.
title Simulation-based Inference for High-dimensional Data using Surjective Sequential Neural Likelihood Estimation
topic Machine Learning
Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.01054