Local Kernel Dimension Reduction in Approximate Bayesian Computation

Abstract

Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) is a popular sampling method in applications involving intractable likelihood functions. Instead of evaluating the likelihood function, ABC approximates the posterior distribution by a set of accepted samples which are simulated from a generating model. Simulated samples are accepted if the distances between the samples and the observation are smaller than some threshold. The distance is calculated in terms of summary statistics. This paper proposes Local Gradient Kernel Dimension Reduction (LGKDR) to construct low dimensional summary statistics for ABC. The proposed method identifies a sufficient subspace of the original summary statistics by implicitly considering all non-linear transforms therein, and a weighting kernel is used for the concentration of the projections. No strong assumptions are made on the marginal distributions , nor the regression models, permitting usage in a wide range of applications. Experiments are done with simple rejection ABC and sequential Monte Carlo ABC methods. Results are reported as competitive in the former and substantially better in the latter cases in which Monte Carlo errors are compressed as much as possible.