MIRA: A Score for Conditional Distribution Accuracy and Model Comparison

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Sharief, Sammy, Zeghal, Justine, Barco, Gabriel Missael, Lemos, Pablo, Hezaveh, Yashar, Perreault-Levasseur, Laurence
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Sharief, Sammy
Zeghal, Justine
Barco, Gabriel Missael
Lemos, Pablo
Hezaveh, Yashar
Perreault-Levasseur, Laurence
author_facet Sharief, Sammy
Zeghal, Justine
Barco, Gabriel Missael
Lemos, Pablo
Hezaveh, Yashar
Perreault-Levasseur, Laurence
contents We introduce Mira, a sample-based score for assessing the accuracy of a candidate conditional distribution using only joint samples from the true data-generating process. Relying on the principle that distributions coincide if they assign equal probability mass to all regions, we derive an analytic expression for the Mira statistic, whose average defines the Mira score. This formulation further allows us to compute theoretical reference values and uncertainty estimates when the candidate distribution matches the true one. This framework enables model comparison by quantifying the alignment between the conditional distribution of a candidate model and the true data generating process. Consequently, Mira enables Bayesian model comparison through direct posterior validation, bypassing the challenging evidence computation. We demonstrate its effectiveness across several toy problems and Bayesian inference tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_02014
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MIRA: A Score for Conditional Distribution Accuracy and Model Comparison
Sharief, Sammy
Zeghal, Justine
Barco, Gabriel Missael
Lemos, Pablo
Hezaveh, Yashar
Perreault-Levasseur, Laurence
Machine Learning
We introduce Mira, a sample-based score for assessing the accuracy of a candidate conditional distribution using only joint samples from the true data-generating process. Relying on the principle that distributions coincide if they assign equal probability mass to all regions, we derive an analytic expression for the Mira statistic, whose average defines the Mira score. This formulation further allows us to compute theoretical reference values and uncertainty estimates when the candidate distribution matches the true one. This framework enables model comparison by quantifying the alignment between the conditional distribution of a candidate model and the true data generating process. Consequently, Mira enables Bayesian model comparison through direct posterior validation, bypassing the challenging evidence computation. We demonstrate its effectiveness across several toy problems and Bayesian inference tasks.
title MIRA: A Score for Conditional Distribution Accuracy and Model Comparison
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.02014