Post-Inference Prior Swapping

Willie Neiswanger, Eric Xing
Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning, PMLR 70:2594-2602, 2017.

Abstract

While Bayesian methods are praised for their ability to incorporate useful prior knowledge, in practice, convenient priors that allow for computationally cheap or tractable inference are commonly used. In this paper, we investigate the following question: for a given model, is it possible to compute an inference result with any convenient false prior, and afterwards, given any target prior of interest, quickly transform this result into the target posterior? A potential solution is to use importance sampling (IS). However, we demonstrate that IS will fail for many choices of the target prior, depending on its parametric form and similarity to the false prior. Instead, we propose prior swapping, a method that leverages the pre-inferred false posterior to efficiently generate accurate posterior samples under arbitrary target priors. Prior swapping lets us apply less-costly inference algorithms to certain models, and incorporate new or updated prior information “post-inference”. We give theoretical guarantees about our method, and demonstrate it empirically on a number of models and priors.

Cite this Paper

BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v70-neiswanger17a, title = {Post-Inference Prior Swapping}, author = {Willie Neiswanger and Eric Xing}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning}, pages = {2594--2602}, year = {2017}, editor = {Precup, Doina and Teh, Yee Whye}, volume = {70}, series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research}, month = {06--11 Aug}, publisher = {PMLR}, pdf = {http://proceedings.mlr.press/v70/neiswanger17a/neiswanger17a.pdf}, url = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v70/neiswanger17a.html}, abstract = {While Bayesian methods are praised for their ability to incorporate useful prior knowledge, in practice, convenient priors that allow for computationally cheap or tractable inference are commonly used. In this paper, we investigate the following question: for a given model, is it possible to compute an inference result with any convenient false prior, and afterwards, given any target prior of interest, quickly transform this result into the target posterior? A potential solution is to use importance sampling (IS). However, we demonstrate that IS will fail for many choices of the target prior, depending on its parametric form and similarity to the false prior. Instead, we propose prior swapping, a method that leverages the pre-inferred false posterior to efficiently generate accurate posterior samples under arbitrary target priors. Prior swapping lets us apply less-costly inference algorithms to certain models, and incorporate new or updated prior information “post-inference”. We give theoretical guarantees about our method, and demonstrate it empirically on a number of models and priors.} }
Endnote
%0 Conference Paper %T Post-Inference Prior Swapping %A Willie Neiswanger %A Eric Xing %B Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning %C Proceedings of Machine Learning Research %D 2017 %E Doina Precup %E Yee Whye Teh %F pmlr-v70-neiswanger17a %I PMLR %P 2594--2602 %U https://proceedings.mlr.press/v70/neiswanger17a.html %V 70 %X While Bayesian methods are praised for their ability to incorporate useful prior knowledge, in practice, convenient priors that allow for computationally cheap or tractable inference are commonly used. In this paper, we investigate the following question: for a given model, is it possible to compute an inference result with any convenient false prior, and afterwards, given any target prior of interest, quickly transform this result into the target posterior? A potential solution is to use importance sampling (IS). However, we demonstrate that IS will fail for many choices of the target prior, depending on its parametric form and similarity to the false prior. Instead, we propose prior swapping, a method that leverages the pre-inferred false posterior to efficiently generate accurate posterior samples under arbitrary target priors. Prior swapping lets us apply less-costly inference algorithms to certain models, and incorporate new or updated prior information “post-inference”. We give theoretical guarantees about our method, and demonstrate it empirically on a number of models and priors.
APA
Neiswanger, W. & Xing, E.. (2017). Post-Inference Prior Swapping. Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning, in Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 70:2594-2602 Available from https://proceedings.mlr.press/v70/neiswanger17a.html.

Related Material