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Mining gold from implicit models to improve likelihood-free inference (arxiv.org)
3 points by Anon84 on Feb 21, 2020 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Simulators often can't give output probabilities, so people compare simulated and real data using hand-picked summaries. It pulls extra hints from the simulator—which setting is more likely and which way to nudge it—to train a neural network with fewer simulations and better answers.

Abstract

Simulators often provide the best description of real-world phenomena. However, they also lead to challenging inverse problems because the density they implicitly define is often intractable. We present a new suite of simulation-based inference techniques that go beyond the traditional Approximate Bayesian Computation approach, which struggles in a high-dimensional setting, and extend methods that use surrogate models based on neural networks. We show that additional information, such as the joint likelihood ratio and the joint score, can often be extracted from simulators and used to augment the training data for these surrogate models. Finally, we demonstrate that these new techniques are more sample efficient and provide higher-fidelity inference than traditional methods.

Johann Brehmer, Gilles Louppe, Juan Pavez, Kyle Cranmer
arXiv:1805.12244 · stat.ML, cs.LG, hep-ph, physics.data-an · submitted May 30, 2018 · updated Aug 5, 2019
abstract · pdf · html · Code available at https://github.com/johannbrehmer/simulator-mining-example . v2: Fixed typos. v3: Expanded discussion, added Lotka-Volterra example. v4: Improved clarity

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