General bounds on the quality of Bayesian coresets

Fuente: arXiv
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Autore principale: Campbell, Trevor
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Campbell, Trevor
author_facet Campbell, Trevor
contents Bayesian coresets speed up posterior inference in the large-scale data regime by approximating the full-data log-likelihood function with a surrogate log-likelihood based on a small, weighted subset of the data. But while Bayesian coresets and methods for construction are applicable in a wide range of models, existing theoretical analysis of the posterior inferential error incurred by coreset approximations only apply in restrictive settings -- i.e., exponential family models, or models with strong log-concavity and smoothness assumptions. This work presents general upper and lower bounds on the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence of coreset approximations that reflect the full range of applicability of Bayesian coresets. The lower bounds require only mild model assumptions typical of Bayesian asymptotic analyses, while the upper bounds require the log-likelihood functions to satisfy a generalized subexponentiality criterion that is weaker than conditions used in earlier work. The lower bounds are applied to obtain fundamental limitations on the quality of coreset approximations, and to provide a theoretical explanation for the previously-observed poor empirical performance of importance sampling-based construction methods. The upper bounds are used to analyze the performance of recent subsample-optimize methods. The flexibility of the theory is demonstrated in validation experiments involving multimodal, unidentifiable, heavy-tailed Bayesian posterior distributions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_11780
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle General bounds on the quality of Bayesian coresets
Campbell, Trevor
Machine Learning
Statistics Theory
Computation
Bayesian coresets speed up posterior inference in the large-scale data regime by approximating the full-data log-likelihood function with a surrogate log-likelihood based on a small, weighted subset of the data. But while Bayesian coresets and methods for construction are applicable in a wide range of models, existing theoretical analysis of the posterior inferential error incurred by coreset approximations only apply in restrictive settings -- i.e., exponential family models, or models with strong log-concavity and smoothness assumptions. This work presents general upper and lower bounds on the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence of coreset approximations that reflect the full range of applicability of Bayesian coresets. The lower bounds require only mild model assumptions typical of Bayesian asymptotic analyses, while the upper bounds require the log-likelihood functions to satisfy a generalized subexponentiality criterion that is weaker than conditions used in earlier work. The lower bounds are applied to obtain fundamental limitations on the quality of coreset approximations, and to provide a theoretical explanation for the previously-observed poor empirical performance of importance sampling-based construction methods. The upper bounds are used to analyze the performance of recent subsample-optimize methods. The flexibility of the theory is demonstrated in validation experiments involving multimodal, unidentifiable, heavy-tailed Bayesian posterior distributions.
title General bounds on the quality of Bayesian coresets
topic Machine Learning
Statistics Theory
Computation
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.11780