Kernel Thinning and Stein Thinning
Video recording:
Speaker: Lester Mackey (Microsoft Research New England & Stanford University, USA)
Title: Kernel Thinning and Stein Thinning
Time: Wednesday, 2022.02.23, 3:00 p.m. (CET)
Place: fully virtual (contact Dr. Jakub Lengiewicz to register)
Format: 30 min. presentation + 30 min. discussion
Abstract: This talk will introduce two new tools for summarizing a probability distribution more effectively than independent sampling or standard Markov chain Monte Carlo thinning:
1. Given an initial n point summary (for example, from independent sampling or a Markov chain), kernel thinning finds a subset of only square-root n points with comparable worst-case integration error across a reproducing kernel Hilbert space.
2. If the initial summary suffers from biases due to off-target sampling, tempering, or burn-in, Stein thinning simultaneously compresses the summary and improves the accuracy by correcting for these biases.
These tools are especially well-suited for tasks that incur substantial downstream computation costs per summary point like organ and tissue modeling in which each simulation consumes 1000s of CPU hours.