Introducing Monte Carlo Methods with R
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The document discusses the history and importance of chocolate in human civilization. It notes that chocolate originated in Mesoamerica over 3000 years ago and was prized by the Aztecs and Mayans for its taste. Cocoa beans were used as currency and their cultivation was tightly regulated. The Spanish brought cocoa to Europe in the 16th century, starting its global spread and the development of the chocolate industry.
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The document summarizes Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC). It discusses how ABC provides a way to approximate Bayesian inference when the likelihood function is intractable or too computationally expensive to evaluate directly. ABC works by simulating data under different parameter values and accepting simulations that are close to the observed data according to a distance measure and tolerance level. Key points discussed include:
- ABC provides an approximation to the posterior distribution by sampling from simulations that fall within a tolerance of the observed data.
- Summary statistics are often used to reduce the dimension of the data and improve the signal-to-noise ratio when applying the tolerance criterion.
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Likelihood-free Design: a discussion
1) Likelihood-free Bayesian experimental design is discussed as an intractable likelihood optimization problem, where the goal is to find the optimal design d that minimizes expected loss without using the full posterior distribution.
2) Several Bayesian tools are proposed to make the design problem more Bayesian, including Bayesian non-parametrics, annealing algorithms, and placing a posterior on the design d.
3) Gaussian processes are a default modeling choice for complex unknown functions in these problems, but their accuracy is difficult to assess and they may incur a dimension curse.
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The document discusses Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC), a simulation-based method for conducting Bayesian inference when the likelihood function is intractable or unavailable. ABC works by simulating data from the model, accepting simulations that are close to the observed data based on a distance measure and tolerance level. This provides samples from an approximation of the posterior distribution. The document provides examples that motivate ABC and outlines the basic ABC algorithm. It also discusses extensions and improvements to the standard ABC method.
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