Deep learning methods for likelihood-free inference :approximating the posterior distribution with convolutional neural networks

Abstract

In this thesis, a fast and likelihood-free approach for parameter inference is introduced. The convolutional neural network, named DeepInference, learns to predict the posterior mean and variance of multi-dimensional posterior distributions from raw simulated data. It is shown how DeepInference can be applied to the drift diffusion model (DDM) and the Lévy flight model, a likelihood-free extension of the DDM. For both models, state-of-the-art results in terms of accuracy of parameter estimation are observed