arXiv subjects

Jonah Gabry

Publications and source records attributed to Jonah Gabry.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

Multilevel Regression and Poststratification Interface: An Application to Track Community-level COVID-19 Viral Transmission

We present a novel Bayesian workflow for multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP), introducing extensions to time-varying data and granular geography and publicly available open-source computation tools, facilitating broad research adoption and reproducibility. In the absence of comprehensive or random testing throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, we have developed a proxy method for synthetic random sampling to estimate community-level viral incidence, based on viral RNA testing of asymptomatic patients who present for elective procedures within a hospital system. The approach collects routine testing data on SARS-CoV-2 exposure among outpatients and performs statistical adjustments of sample representation using MRP, a procedure that adjusts for nonrepresentativeness of the sample and yields stable small group estimates. We illustrate the MRP interface with an application to track community-level COVID-19 viral transmission in the state of Michigan.

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arXiv2020

Bayesian Workflow

The Bayesian approach to data analysis provides a powerful way to handle uncertainty in all observations, model parameters, and model structure using probability theory. Probabilistic programming languages make it easier to specify and fit Bayesian models, but this still leaves us with many options regarding constructing, evaluating, and using these models, along with many remaining challenges in computation. Using Bayesian inference to solve real-world problems requires not only statistical skills, subject matter knowledge, and programming, but also awareness of the decisions made in the process of data analysis. All of these aspects can be understood as part of a tangled workflow of applied Bayesian statistics. Beyond inference, the workflow also includes iterative model building, model checking, validation and troubleshooting of computational problems, model understanding, and model comparison. We review all these aspects of workflow in the context of several examples, keeping in mind that in practice we will be fitting many models for any given problem, even if only a subset of them will ultimately be relevant for our conclusions.

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arXiv2020

Efficient leave-one-out cross-validation for Bayesian non-factorized normal and Student-t models

Cross-validation can be used to measure a model's predictive accuracy for the purpose of model comparison, averaging, or selection. Standard leave-one-out cross-validation (LOO-CV) requires that the observation model can be factorized into simple terms, but a lot of important models in temporal and spatial statistics do not have this property or are inefficient or unstable when forced into a factorized form. We derive how to efficiently compute and validate both exact and approximate LOO-CV for any Bayesian non-factorized model with a multivariate normal or Student-t distribution on the outcome values. We demonstrate the method using lagged simultaneously autoregressive (SAR) models as a case study.

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arXiv2020

Approximate leave-future-out cross-validation for Bayesian time series models

One of the common goals of time series analysis is to use the observed series to inform predictions for future observations. In the absence of any actual new data to predict, cross-validation can be used to estimate a model's future predictive accuracy, for instance, for the purpose of model comparison or selection. Exact cross-validation for Bayesian models is often computationally expensive, but approximate cross-validation methods have been developed, most notably methods for leave-one-out cross-validation (LOO-CV). If the actual prediction task is to predict the future given the past, LOO-CV provides an overly optimistic estimate because the information from future observations is available to influence predictions of the past. To properly account for the time series structure, we can use leave-future-out cross-validation (LFO-CV). Like exact LOO-CV, exact LFO-CV requires refitting the model many times to different subsets of the data. Using Pareto smoothed importance sampling, we propose a method for approximating exact LFO-CV that drastically reduces the computational costs while also providing informative diagnostics about the quality of the approximation.

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arXiv2018

Visualization in Bayesian workflow

Bayesian data analysis is about more than just computing a posterior distribution, and Bayesian visualization is about more than trace plots of Markov chains. Practical Bayesian data analysis, like all data analysis, is an iterative process of model building, inference, model checking and evaluation, and model expansion. Visualization is helpful in each of these stages of the Bayesian workflow and it is indispensable when drawing inferences from the types of modern, high-dimensional models that are used by applied researchers.

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arXiv2016

Practical Bayesian model evaluation using leave-one-out cross-validation and WAIC

Leave-one-out cross-validation (LOO) and the widely applicable information criterion (WAIC) are methods for estimating pointwise out-of-sample prediction accuracy from a fitted Bayesian model using the log-likelihood evaluated at the posterior simulations of the parameter values. LOO and WAIC have various advantages over simpler estimates of predictive error such as AIC and DIC but are less used in practice because they involve additional computational steps. Here we lay out fast and stable computations for LOO and WAIC that can be performed using existing simulation draws. We introduce an efficient computation of LOO using Pareto-smoothed importance sampling (PSIS), a new procedure for regularizing importance weights. Although WAIC is asymptotically equal to LOO, we demonstrate that PSIS-LOO is more robust in the finite case with weak priors or influential observations. As a byproduct of our calculations, we also obtain approximate standard errors for estimated predictive errors and for comparing of predictive errors between two models. We implement the computations in an R package called 'loo' and demonstrate using models fit with the Bayesian inference package Stan.

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arXiv2015

Pareto Smoothed Importance Sampling

Importance weighting is a general way to adjust Monte Carlo integration to account for draws from the wrong distribution, but the resulting estimate can be highly variable when the importance ratios have a heavy right tail. This routinely occurs when there are aspects of the target distribution that are not well captured by the approximating distribution, in which case more stable estimates can be obtained by modifying extreme importance ratios. We present a new method for stabilizing importance weights using a generalized Pareto distribution fit to the upper tail of the distribution of the simulated importance ratios. The method, which empirically performs better than existing methods for stabilizing importance sampling estimates, includes stabilized effective sample size estimates, Monte Carlo error estimates, and convergence diagnostics. The presented Pareto $\hat{k}$ finite sample convergence rate diagnostic is useful for any Monte Carlo estimator.

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