Partially factorized variational inference for high-dimensional mixed models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Goplerud, Max, Papaspiliopoulos, Omiros, Zanella, Giacomo
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
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author Goplerud, Max
Papaspiliopoulos, Omiros
Zanella, Giacomo
author_facet Goplerud, Max
Papaspiliopoulos, Omiros
Zanella, Giacomo
contents While generalized linear mixed models are a fundamental tool in applied statistics, many specifications, such as those involving categorical factors with many levels or interaction terms, can be computationally challenging to estimate due to the need to compute or approximate high-dimensional integrals. Variational inference is a popular way to perform such computations, especially in the Bayesian context. However, naive use of such methods can provide unreliable uncertainty quantification. We show that this is indeed the case for mixed models, proving that standard mean-field variational inference dramatically underestimates posterior uncertainty in high-dimensions. We then show how appropriately relaxing the mean-field assumption leads to methods whose uncertainty quantification does not deteriorate in high-dimensions, and whose total computational cost scales linearly with the number of parameters and observations. Our theoretical and numerical results focus on mixed models with Gaussian or binomial likelihoods, and rely on connections to random graph theory to obtain sharp high-dimensional asymptotic analysis. We also provide generic results, which are of independent interest, relating the accuracy of variational inference to the convergence rate of the corresponding coordinate ascent algorithm that is used to find it. Our proposed methodology is implemented in the R package, see https://github.com/mgoplerud/vglmer . Numerical results with simulated and real data examples illustrate the favourable computation cost versus accuracy trade-off of our approach compared to various alternatives.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2312_13148
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Partially factorized variational inference for high-dimensional mixed models
Goplerud, Max
Papaspiliopoulos, Omiros
Zanella, Giacomo
Methodology
Computation
Machine Learning
While generalized linear mixed models are a fundamental tool in applied statistics, many specifications, such as those involving categorical factors with many levels or interaction terms, can be computationally challenging to estimate due to the need to compute or approximate high-dimensional integrals. Variational inference is a popular way to perform such computations, especially in the Bayesian context. However, naive use of such methods can provide unreliable uncertainty quantification. We show that this is indeed the case for mixed models, proving that standard mean-field variational inference dramatically underestimates posterior uncertainty in high-dimensions. We then show how appropriately relaxing the mean-field assumption leads to methods whose uncertainty quantification does not deteriorate in high-dimensions, and whose total computational cost scales linearly with the number of parameters and observations. Our theoretical and numerical results focus on mixed models with Gaussian or binomial likelihoods, and rely on connections to random graph theory to obtain sharp high-dimensional asymptotic analysis. We also provide generic results, which are of independent interest, relating the accuracy of variational inference to the convergence rate of the corresponding coordinate ascent algorithm that is used to find it. Our proposed methodology is implemented in the R package, see https://github.com/mgoplerud/vglmer . Numerical results with simulated and real data examples illustrate the favourable computation cost versus accuracy trade-off of our approach compared to various alternatives.
title Partially factorized variational inference for high-dimensional mixed models
topic Methodology
Computation
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.13148