ABC model choice by random forests

After more than a year of collaboration, meetings, simulations, delays, switches,  visits, more delays, more simulations, discussions, and a final marathon wrapping day last Friday, Jean-Michel Marin, Pierre Pudlo,  and I at last completed our latest collaboration on ABC, with the central arguments that (a) using random forests is a good tool for choosing the most appropriate model and (b) evaluating the posterior misclassification error rather than the posterior probability of a model is an appropriate paradigm shift. The paper has been co-signed with our population genetics colleagues, Jean-Marie Cornuet and Arnaud Estoup, as they provided helpful advice on the tools and on the genetic illustrations and as they plan to include those new tools in their future analyses and DIYABC software.  ABC model choice via random forests is now arXived and very soon to be submitted…

One scientific reason for this fairly long conception is that it took us several iterations to understand the intrinsic nature of the random forest tool and how it could be most naturally embedded in ABC schemes. We first imagined it as a filter from a set of summary statistics to a subset of significant statistics (hence the automated ABC advertised in some of my past or future talks!), with the additional appeal of an associated distance induced by the forest. However, we later realised that (a) further ABC steps were counterproductive once the model was selected by the random forest and (b) including more summary statistics was always beneficial to the performances of the forest and (c) the connections between (i) the true posterior probability of a model, (ii) the ABC version of this probability, (iii) the random forest version of the above, were at best very loose. The above picture is taken from the paper: it shows how the true and the ABC probabilities (do not) relate in the example of an MA(q) model… We thus had another round of discussions and experiments before deciding the unthinkable, namely to give up the attempts to approximate the posterior probability in this setting and to come up with another assessment of the uncertainty associated with the decision. This led us to propose to compute a posterior predictive error as the error assessment for ABC model choice. This is mostly a classification error but (a) it is based on the ABC posterior distribution rather than on the prior and (b) it does not require extra-computations when compared with other empirical measures such as cross-validation, while avoiding the sin of using the data twice!