Scalable Expectation Propagation for Mixed-Effects Regression

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhou, Jackson, Ormerod, John T., Grazian, Clara
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Zhou, Jackson
Ormerod, John T.
Grazian, Clara
author_facet Zhou, Jackson
Ormerod, John T.
Grazian, Clara
contents Mixed-effects regression models represent a useful subclass of regression models for grouped data; the introduction of random effects allows for the correlation between observations within each group to be conveniently captured when inferring the fixed effects. At a time where such regression models are being fit to increasingly large datasets with many groups, it is ideal if (a) the time it takes to make the inferences scales linearly with the number of groups and (b) the inference workload can be distributed across multiple computational nodes in a numerically stable way, if the dataset cannot be stored in one location. Current Bayesian inference approaches for mixed-effects regression models do not seem to account for both challenges simultaneously. To address this, we develop an expectation propagation (EP) framework in this setting that is both scalable and numerically stable when distributed for the case where there is only one grouping factor. The main technical innovations lie in the sparse reparameterisation of the EP algorithm, and a moment propagation (MP) based refinement for multivariate random effect factor approximations. Experiments are conducted to show that this EP framework achieves linear scaling, while having comparable accuracy to other scalable approximate Bayesian inference (ABI) approaches.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_14646
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Scalable Expectation Propagation for Mixed-Effects Regression
Zhou, Jackson
Ormerod, John T.
Grazian, Clara
Methodology
Mixed-effects regression models represent a useful subclass of regression models for grouped data; the introduction of random effects allows for the correlation between observations within each group to be conveniently captured when inferring the fixed effects. At a time where such regression models are being fit to increasingly large datasets with many groups, it is ideal if (a) the time it takes to make the inferences scales linearly with the number of groups and (b) the inference workload can be distributed across multiple computational nodes in a numerically stable way, if the dataset cannot be stored in one location. Current Bayesian inference approaches for mixed-effects regression models do not seem to account for both challenges simultaneously. To address this, we develop an expectation propagation (EP) framework in this setting that is both scalable and numerically stable when distributed for the case where there is only one grouping factor. The main technical innovations lie in the sparse reparameterisation of the EP algorithm, and a moment propagation (MP) based refinement for multivariate random effect factor approximations. Experiments are conducted to show that this EP framework achieves linear scaling, while having comparable accuracy to other scalable approximate Bayesian inference (ABI) approaches.
title Scalable Expectation Propagation for Mixed-Effects Regression
topic Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.14646