Testing and Improving the Robustness of Amortized Bayesian Inference for Cognitive Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Wu, Yufei, Radev, Stefan T., Tuerlinckx, Francis
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Wu, Yufei
Radev, Stefan T.
Tuerlinckx, Francis
author_facet Wu, Yufei
Radev, Stefan T.
Tuerlinckx, Francis
contents Contaminant observations and outliers often cause problems when estimating the parameters of cognitive models, which are statistical models representing cognitive processes. In this study, we test and improve the robustness of parameter estimation using amortized Bayesian inference (ABI) with neural networks. To this end, we conduct systematic analyses on a toy example and analyze both synthetic and real data using a popular cognitive model, the Drift Diffusion Models (DDM). First, we study the sensitivity of ABI to contaminants with tools from robust statistics: the empirical influence function and the breakdown point. Next, we propose a data augmentation or noise injection approach that incorporates a contamination distribution into the data-generating process during training. We examine several candidate distributions and evaluate their performance and cost in terms of accuracy and efficiency loss relative to a standard estimator. Introducing contaminants from a Cauchy distribution during training considerably increases the robustness of the neural density estimator as measured by bounded influence functions and a much higher breakdown point. Overall, the proposed method is straightforward and practical to implement and has a broad applicability in fields where outlier detection or removal is challenging.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_20586
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Testing and Improving the Robustness of Amortized Bayesian Inference for Cognitive Models
Wu, Yufei
Radev, Stefan T.
Tuerlinckx, Francis
Machine Learning
Applications
Methodology
Contaminant observations and outliers often cause problems when estimating the parameters of cognitive models, which are statistical models representing cognitive processes. In this study, we test and improve the robustness of parameter estimation using amortized Bayesian inference (ABI) with neural networks. To this end, we conduct systematic analyses on a toy example and analyze both synthetic and real data using a popular cognitive model, the Drift Diffusion Models (DDM). First, we study the sensitivity of ABI to contaminants with tools from robust statistics: the empirical influence function and the breakdown point. Next, we propose a data augmentation or noise injection approach that incorporates a contamination distribution into the data-generating process during training. We examine several candidate distributions and evaluate their performance and cost in terms of accuracy and efficiency loss relative to a standard estimator. Introducing contaminants from a Cauchy distribution during training considerably increases the robustness of the neural density estimator as measured by bounded influence functions and a much higher breakdown point. Overall, the proposed method is straightforward and practical to implement and has a broad applicability in fields where outlier detection or removal is challenging.
title Testing and Improving the Robustness of Amortized Bayesian Inference for Cognitive Models
topic Machine Learning
Applications
Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.20586