Tutorial 04: Uncertainty and integration

Finn Lindgren

Introduction

In this lab session you will explore

• using RMarkdown to organise text and code
• maximum likelihood estimator sampling distributions and approximate confidence interval construction
• Laplace approximation and importance sampling for approximate Bayesian credible interval construction

1. Clone your lab04-* repository from https://github.com/StatComp21/ either on your own computer (new Project from version control) or to https://rstudio.cloud
2. If on rstudio.cloud, setup GITHUB_PAT credentials, like before.
3. Upgrade/install the StatCompLab package, see https://finnlindgren.github.io/StatCompLab/
4. The repository has two files, RMDemo.Rmd and my_code.R. Make a copy of RMDemo.Rmd, and call it Lab4.Rmd
5. During this lab, modify the Lab4.Rmd document and add new code and text commentary for the lab to the document. (You can remove the demonstration parts of the file when you don’t need them anymore, and/or keep a separate copy of it.) When pressing the “knit” button, the RMarkdown file will be run in its own R environment, so you need to include any needed library() calls in a code chnk in the file, normally an initial “setup” chunk.

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Solution:

The accompanying Tutorial04Solutions tutorial/vignette documents contain the solutions explicitly, to make it easier to review the material after the workshops. The separate T4sol.Rmd document at https://github.com/finnlindgren/StatCompLab/blob/main/vignettes/articles/T4sol.Rmd is the source document for the standalone solution shown in T4sol on the StatCompLab website.

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Three alternatives for Poisson parameter confidence intervals

Consider the Poisson model for observations $\boldsymbol{y}=\{y_1,\dots,y_n\}$: $$\begin{aligned} y_i & \sim \mathsf{Poisson}(\lambda), \quad\text{independent for $i=1,\dots,n$.} \end{aligned}$$ that has joint probability mass function $$p(\boldsymbol{y}|\lambda) = \exp(-n\lambda) \prod_{i=1}^n \frac{\lambda^{y_i}}{y_i!}$$ In the week 4 lecture, two parameterisations were considered. We now add a third option:

1. $\theta = \lambda$, and $\widehat{\theta}_\text{ML}=\frac{1}{n}\sum_{i=1}^n y_i = \overline{y}$
2. $\theta = \sqrt{\lambda}$, and $\widehat{\theta}_\text{ML}=\sqrt{\overline{y}}$
3. $\theta = \log(\lambda)$, and $\widehat{\theta}_\text{ML}=\log\left(\overline{y}\right)$

From the week 4 lecture, we know that the inverse expected Fisher information is $\lambda/n$ for case 1 and $1/(4n)$ for case 2. For case 3, show that the inverse expected Fisher information is $1/(n\lambda)$.

Interval construction

Use the approximation method for large $n$ from the lecture to construct approximate confidence intervals for $\lambda$ using each of the three parameterisations. Define three functions, CI1, CI2, and CI3, each taking paramters

• y: a vector of observed values
• alpha: the nominal error probability of the confidence intervals

To avoid having to specify alpha in a common case, you can use alpha = 0.05 in the function argument definition to set a default value.

The function pmax may be useful (see its help text).

You can use the following code to test your functions, storing each interval as a row of a matrix with rbind (“bind” as “rows”, see also cbind for combining columns):

y <- rpois(n = 5, lambda = 2)
print(y)

## [1] 0 2 2 2 4

CI <- rbind(
  "Method 1" = CI1(y),
  "Method 2" = CI2(y),
  "Method 3" = CI3(y)
)
colnames(CI) <- c("Lower", "Upper")

We can print the result as a table in our RMarkdown by using a separate codechunk, calling the knitr::kable function:

knitr::kable(CI)

	Lower	Upper
Method 1	0.7604099	3.239590
Method 2	0.9524829	3.431663
Method 3	1.0761094	3.717094

Will all three methods always produce a valid interval? Consider the possible values of $\overline{y}$. Experiment with different values of n and lambda in the simulation of y.

For each approximate confidence interval construction method, we might ask the question of whether it fulfils the definition of an actual confidence interval construction method; that $\mathsf{P}_{\boldsymbol{y}|\theta}(\theta\in \text{CI}(\boldsymbol{y})|\theta)\geq 1-\alpha$ for all $\theta$ (or at least for a relevant subset of the parameter space). In coursework project 1, you will investigate the accuracy of some approximate confidence interval construction methods.

Bayesian credible intervals

Assume a true value of $\lambda=10$, and simulate a sample of $\boldsymbol{y}$ of size $n=5$.

Now consider a Bayesian version of the Poisson model, with prior model $$\lambda \sim \mathsf{Exp}(a)$$ that has probability density function $p(\lambda) = a \exp(-a \lambda)$.

One can show that the exact posterior distribution for $\lambda$ given $\boldsymbol{y}$ is a $\mathsf{Gamma}(1 + \sum_{i=1}^n y_i, a + n)$ distribution (using the shape&rate parameterisation), and credible intervals can be constructed from quantiles of this distribution.

In cases where the theoretical construction is impractical, an alternative is to instead construct samples from the posterior distribution, and extract empirical quantiles from this sample. Here, we will use importance sampling to achieve this.

Let $\theta=\log(\lambda)$, so that $\lambda=\exp(\theta)$. Show that the prior probability density for $\theta$ is $p(\theta)=a \exp\left( \theta-ae^\theta \right)$.

Gaussian approximation

The posterior density function for $\theta$ is $$p(\theta|\boldsymbol{y}) = \frac{p(\theta) p(\boldsymbol{y}|\theta)}{p(\boldsymbol{y})}$$ with log-density $$\log p(\theta|\boldsymbol{y}) = \text{const} + \theta (1 + n\overline{y}) - (a+n)\exp(\theta) ,$$ and by taking derivatives we find the mode at $\widetilde{\theta}=\log\left(\frac{1+n\overline{y}}{a+n}\right)$, and negated Hessian $1+n\overline{y}$ at the mode.

With this information we can construct a Gaussian approximation to the posterior distribution, $\widetilde{p}(\theta|\boldsymbol{y})\sim\mathsf{Normal}(\widetilde{\theta},\frac{1}{1+n\overline{y}})$.

Importance sampling

Simulate a sample $\boldsymbol{x}=\{x_1,\dots,x_m\}$ from this Gaussian approximation of the posterior distribution, for some large $m > 10000$, with hyperparameter $a=1/5$.

We need to calculate unnormalised importance weights $w_k$, $k=1,\dots,m$, $$w_k = \left.\frac{p(\theta)p(\boldsymbol{y}|\theta)}{\widetilde{p}(\theta|\boldsymbol{y})}\right|_{\theta=x_k} .$$ Due to lack of normalisation, these “raw” weights cannot be represented accurately in the computer. To get around that issue, first compute the logarithm of the weights, $\log(w_k)$, and then new, equivalent unnormalised weights $\widetilde{w}_k=\exp[\log(w_k) - \max_j \log(w_j)]$.

Look at the help text for the function wquantile (in the StatCompLab package, from version 0.4.0) that computes quantiles from a weighted sample, and construct a 95% credible interval for $\theta$ using the $\boldsymbol{x}$ sample and associate weights, and then transform it into a credible interval for $\lambda$

Cumulative distribution function comparison

With ggplot, use geom_function to plot the theoretical posterior cumulative distribution function for $\lambda$ (the CDF from the Gamma distribution given above, see pgamma()) and compare it to the approximation given by the importance sampling. The stat_ewcdf() function from the StatCompLab should be used to plot the cdf for the weighted sample $\lambda_k=\exp(x_k)$, with (unnormalised) weights $w_k$. Also include the unweighted sample, with stat_ecwf(). How close does the approximations come to the true posterior distribution?