Abstract
The fate of scientific hypotheses often relies on the ability of a
computational model to explain the data, quantified in modern statistical
approaches by the likelihood function. The log-likelihood is the key element
for parameter estimation and model evaluation. However, the log-likelihood of
complex models in fields such as computational biology and neuroscience is
often intractable to compute analytically or numerically. In those cases,
researchers can often only estimate the log-likelihood by comparing observed
data with synthetic observations generated by model simulations. Standard
techniques to approximate the likelihood via simulation either use summary
statistics of the data or are at risk of producing severe biases in the
estimate. Here, we explore another method, inverse binomial sampling (IBS),
which can estimate the log-likelihood of an entire data set efficiently and
without bias. For each observation, IBS draws samples from the simulator model
until one matches the observation. The log-likelihood estimate is then a
function of the number of samples drawn. The variance of this estimator is
uniformly bounded, achieves the minimum variance for an unbiased estimator, and
we can compute calibrated estimates of the variance. We provide theoretical
arguments in favor of IBS and an empirical assessment of the method for
maximum-likelihood estimation with simulation-based models. As case studies, we
take three model-fitting problems of increasing complexity from computational
and cognitive neuroscience. In all problems, IBS generally produces lower error
in the estimated parameters and maximum log-likelihood values than alternative
sampling methods with the same average number of samples. Our results
demonstrate the potential of IBS as a practical, robust, and easy to implement
method for log-likelihood evaluation when exact techniques are not available.
Description
[2001.03985] Unbiased and Efficient Log-Likelihood Estimation with Inverse Binomial Sampling
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