Performing inference in statistical models with an intractable likelihood is challenging, therefore, most likelihood-free inference (LFI) methods encounter accuracy and efficiency limitations. In this paper, we present the implementation of the LFI method Robust Optimisation Monte Carlo (ROMC) in the Python package ELFI. ROMC is a novel and efficient (highly-parallelizable) LFI framework that provides accurate weighted samples from the posterior. Our implementation can be used in two ways. First, a scientist may use it as an out-of-the-box LFI algorithm; we provide an easy-to-use API harmonized with the principles of ELFI, enabling effortless comparisons with the rest of the methods included in the package. Additionally, we have carefully split ROMC into isolated components for supporting extensibility. A researcher may experiment with novel method(s) for solving part(s) of ROMC without reimplementing everything from scratch. In both scenarios, the ROMC parts can run in a fully-parallelized manner, exploiting all CPU cores. We also provide helpful functionalities for (i) inspecting the inference process and (ii) evaluating the obtained samples. Finally, we test the robustness of our implementation on some typical LFI examples.

We consider the fundamental problem of how to automatically construct summary statistics for implicit generative models where the evaluation of likelihood function is intractable but sampling / simulating data from the model is possible. The idea is to frame the task of constructing sufficient statistics as learning mutual information maximizing representation of the data. This representation is computed by a deep neural network trained by a joint statistic-posterior learning strategy. We apply our approach to both traditional approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) and recent neural likelihood approaches, boosting their performance on a range of tasks.

We consider Bayesian inference when only a limited number of noisy log-likelihood evaluations can be obtained. This occurs for example when complex simulator-based statistical models are fitted to data, and synthetic likelihood (SL) is used to form the noisy log-likelihood estimates using computationally costly forward simulations. We frame the inference task as a Bayesian sequential design problem, where the log-likelihood function is modelled with a hierarchical Gaussian process (GP) surrogate model, which is used to efficiently select additional log-likelihood evaluation locations. Motivated by recent progress in batch Bayesian optimisation, we develop various batch-sequential strategies where multiple simulations are adaptively selected to minimise either the expected or median loss function measuring the uncertainty in the resulting posterior. We analyse the properties of the resulting method theoretically and empirically. Experiments with toy problems and three simulation models suggest that our method is robust, highly parallelisable, and sample-efficient.

Bayesian experimental design involves the optimal allocation of resources in an experiment, with the aim of optimising cost and performance. For implicit models, where the likelihood is intractable but sampling from the model is possible, this task is particularly difficult and therefore largely unexplored. This is mainly due to technical difficulties associated with approximating posterior distributions and utility functions. We devise a novel experimental design framework for implicit models that improves upon previous work in two ways. First, we use the mutual information between parameters and data as the utility function, which has previously not been feasible. We achieve this by utilising Likelihood-Free Inference by Ratio Estimation (LFIRE) to approximate posterior distributions, instead of the traditional approximate Bayesian computation or synthetic likelihood methods. Secondly, we use Bayesian optimisation in order to solve the optimal design problem, as opposed to the typically used grid search. We find that this increases efficiency and allows us to consider higher design dimensions.

Unnormalised latent variable models are a broad and flexible class of statistical models. However, learning their parameters from data is intractable, and few estimation techniques are currently available for such models. To increase the number of techniques in our arsenal, we propose variational noise-contrastive estimation (VNCE), building on NCE which is a method that only applies to unnormalised models. The core idea is to use a variational lower bound to the NCE objective function, which can be optimised in the same fashion as the evidence lower bound (ELBO) in standard variational inference (VI). We prove that VNCE can be used for both parameter estimation of unnormalised models and posterior inference of latent variables. The developed theory shows that VNCE has the same level of generality as standard VI, meaning that advances made there can be directly imported to the unnormalised setting. We validate VNCE on toy models and apply it to a realistic problem of estimating an undirected graphical model from incomplete data.

The Engine for Likelihood-Free Inference (ELFI) is a Python software library for performing likelihood-free inference (LFI). ELFI provides a convenient syntax for specifying LFI models commonly composed of priors, simulators, summaries, distances and other custom operations. These can be implemented in a wide variety of languages. Separating the modelling task from the inference makes it possible to use the same model with any of the available inference methods without modifications. A central method implemented in ELFI is Bayesian Optimization for Likelihood-Free Inference (BOLFI), which has recently been shown to accelerate likelihood-free inference up to several orders of magnitude. ELFI also has an inbuilt support for output data storing for reuse and analysis, and supports parallelization of computation from multiple cores up to a cluster environment. ELFI is designed to be extensible and provides interfaces for widening its functionality. This makes addition of new inference methods to ELFI straightforward and automatically compatible with the inbuilt features.

We introduce a new family of estimators for unnormalized statistical models. Our family of estimators is parameterized by two nonlinear functions and uses a single sample from an auxiliary distribution, generalizing Maximum Likelihood Monte Carlo estimation of Geyer and Thompson (1992). The family is such that we can estimate the partition function like any other parameter in the model. The estimation is done by optimizing an algebraically simple, well defined objective function, which allows for the use of dedicated optimization methods. We establish consistency of the estimator family and give an expression for the asymptotic covariance matrix, which enables us to further analyze the influence of the nonlinearities and the auxiliary density on estimation performance. Some estimators in our family are particularly stable for a wide range of auxiliary densities. Interestingly, a specific choice of the nonlinearity establishes a connection between density estimation and classification by nonlinear logistic regression. Finally, the optimal amount of auxiliary samples relative to the given amount of the data is considered from the perspective of computational efficiency.

We show that the Bregman divergence provides a rich framework to estimate unnormalized statistical models for continuous or discrete random variables, that is, models which do not integrate or sum to one, respectively. We prove that recent estimation methods such as noise-contrastive estimation, ratio matching, and score matching belong to the proposed framework, and explain their interconnection based on supervised learning. Further, we discuss the role of boosting in unsupervised learning.