Invited Seminars

IIHE invited seminar: Mining gold from implicit models to improve likelihood-free inference

by Dr Gilles Louppe (ULiege)

Europe/Brussels
Jean Sacton Seminar room (1G003) (IIHE (ULB-VUB))

Jean Sacton Seminar room (1G003)

IIHE (ULB-VUB)

Description
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. https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.12244
Slides