English

Asymptotics of ABC

Methodology 2017-06-26 v1 Statistics Theory Computation Statistics Theory

Abstract

We present an informal review of recent work on the asymptotics of Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC). In particular we focus on how does the ABC posterior, or point estimates obtained by ABC, behave in the limit as we have more data? The results we review show that ABC can perform well in terms of point estimation, but standard implementations will over-estimate the uncertainty about the parameters. If we use the regression correction of Beaumont et al. then ABC can also accurately quantify this uncertainty. The theoretical results also have practical implications for how to implement ABC.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1706.07712,
  title  = {Asymptotics of ABC},
  author = {Paul Fearnhead},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.07712},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

This document is due to appear as a chapter of the forthcoming Handbook of Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) edited by S. Sisson, Y. Fan, and M. Beaumont

R2 v1 2026-06-22T20:27:46.669Z