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Evaluating marginal likelihood with thermodynamic integration method and comparison with several other numerical methods
Author(s) -
Liu Peigui,
Elshall Ahmed S.,
Ye Ming,
Beerli Peter,
Zeng Xiankui,
Lu Dan,
Tao Yuezan
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
water resources research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.863
H-Index - 217
eISSN - 1944-7973
pISSN - 0043-1397
DOI - 10.1002/2014wr016718
Subject(s) - laplace's method , mathematics , thermodynamic integration , numerical integration , monte carlo method , monte carlo integration , likelihood function , mathematical optimization , parametric statistics , marginal likelihood , importance sampling , markov chain monte carlo , computer science , algorithm , bayesian probability , estimation theory , statistics , monte carlo molecular modeling , mathematical analysis , energy (signal processing)
Evaluating marginal likelihood is the most critical and computationally expensive task, when conducting Bayesian model averaging to quantify parametric and model uncertainties. The evaluation is commonly done by using Laplace approximations to evaluate semianalytical expressions of the marginal likelihood or by using Monte Carlo (MC) methods to evaluate arithmetic or harmonic mean of a joint likelihood function. This study introduces a new MC method, i.e., thermodynamic integration, which has not been attempted in environmental modeling. Instead of using samples only from prior parameter space (as in arithmetic mean evaluation) or posterior parameter space (as in harmonic mean evaluation), the thermodynamic integration method uses samples generated gradually from the prior to posterior parameter space. This is done through a path sampling that conducts Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation with different power coefficient values applied to the joint likelihood function. The thermodynamic integration method is evaluated using three analytical functions by comparing the method with two variants of the Laplace approximation method and three MC methods, including the nested sampling method that is recently introduced into environmental modeling. The thermodynamic integration method outperforms the other methods in terms of their accuracy, convergence, and consistency. The thermodynamic integration method is also applied to a synthetic case of groundwater modeling with four alternative models. The application shows that model probabilities obtained using the thermodynamic integration method improves predictive performance of Bayesian model averaging. The thermodynamic integration method is mathematically rigorous, and its MC implementation is computationally general for a wide range of environmental problems.

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