Learning Robust Statistics for Simulation-based Inference under Model Misspecification

Bibliographic Details
Title: Learning Robust Statistics for Simulation-based Inference under Model Misspecification
Authors: Huang, Daolang, Bharti, Ayush, Souza, Amauri, Acerbi, Luigi, Kaski, Samuel
Publication Year: 2023
Collection: Computer Science
Statistics
Subject Terms: Statistics - Machine Learning, Computer Science - Machine Learning, Statistics - Computation
More Details: Simulation-based inference (SBI) methods such as approximate Bayesian computation (ABC), synthetic likelihood, and neural posterior estimation (NPE) rely on simulating statistics to infer parameters of intractable likelihood models. However, such methods are known to yield untrustworthy and misleading inference outcomes under model misspecification, thus hindering their widespread applicability. In this work, we propose the first general approach to handle model misspecification that works across different classes of SBI methods. Leveraging the fact that the choice of statistics determines the degree of misspecification in SBI, we introduce a regularized loss function that penalises those statistics that increase the mismatch between the data and the model. Taking NPE and ABC as use cases, we demonstrate the superior performance of our method on high-dimensional time-series models that are artificially misspecified. We also apply our method to real data from the field of radio propagation where the model is known to be misspecified. We show empirically that the method yields robust inference in misspecified scenarios, whilst still being accurate when the model is well-specified.
Comment: 22 pages, 13 figures, Published at NeurIPS 2023
Document Type: Working Paper
Access URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2305.15871
Accession Number: edsarx.2305.15871
Database: arXiv
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