Asael Alonzo Matamoros

arXiv2025

Uncertainty in Bayesian Leave-One-Out Cross-Validation Based Model Comparison

It is useful to estimate the expected predictive performance of models planned to be used for prediction. We focus on leave-one-out cross-validation (LOO-CV), which has become a popular method for estimating predictive performance of Bayesian models. Given two models, we are interested in comparing the predictive performances and associated uncertainty, which can also be used to compute the probability of one model having better predictive performance than the other model. We study the properties of the Bayesian LOO-CV estimator and the related uncertainty quantification for the predictive performance difference, and analyse when a normal approximation of this uncertainty is well calibrated and whether taking into account higher moments could improve the approximation. We provide new results of the properties both theoretically in the linear regression case and empirically for hierarchical linear, latent linear, and spline models and discuss the challenges. We show that problematic cases include: comparing models with similar predictions, misspecified models, and small data. In these cases, there is a weak connection between the distributions of the LOO-CV estimator and its error. We show that that the problematic skewness of the error distribution for the difference, which occurs when the models make similar predictions, does not fade away when the data size grows to infinity in certain situations. Based on the results, we also provide some practical recommendations for the users of Bayesian LOO-CV for comparing predictive performance of models.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2023

Bayesian order identification of ARMA models with projection predictive inference

Auto-regressive moving-average (ARMA) models are ubiquitous forecasting tools. Parsimony in such models is highly valued for their interpretability and computational tractability, and as such the identification of model orders remains a fundamental task. We propose a novel method of ARMA order identification through projection predictive inference, which benefits from improved stability through the use of a reference model. The procedure consists of two steps: in the first, the practitioner incorporates their understanding of underlying data-generating process into a reference model, which we latterly project onto possibly parsimonious submodels. These submodels are optimally inferred to best replicate the predictive performance of the reference model. We further propose a search heuristic amenable to the ARMA framework. We show that the submodels selected by our procedure exhibit predictive performance at least as good as those chosen by AIC over simulated and real-data experiments, and in some cases out-perform the latter. Finally we show that our procedure is robust to noise, and scales well to larger data.

stat.ME↗