MeasureTheory.jl Issues using LKJL

I came across some issues with MeasureTheory.LKJL while trying to use it with Soss. I'm posting the issue here because I'm not 100% sure which issues need to be resolved here or there.

using Soss, MeasureTheory, SampleChainsDynamicHMC

m = @model N begin
    σ ~ HalfNormal(1) |> iid(N)
    L ~ LKJL(N, 2)
    ŷ ~ Normal() |> iid(N)
    y = σ .* (L * ŷ)  # same as y ~ MvNormal(zeros(N), σ .* (L * L') .* σ')
end

Drawing random samples does not work.

julia> rand(m(4))
ERROR: MethodError: no method matching distproxy(::LKJL{4, (:η,), Tuple{Int64}})

Distributions' LKJ isn't equivalent to LKJL, so we instead overload rand ourselves:

julia> using LinearAlgebra, Random

julia> function Base.rand(rng::AbstractRNG, ::Type, d::LKJL{k}) where {k}
           return cholesky(rand(rng, MeasureTheory.Dists.LKJ(k, d.η))).L
       end;

julia> rand(LKJL(4, 2))  # works!
4×4 LowerTriangular{Float64, Matrix{Float64}}:
 1.0         ⋅          ⋅         ⋅ 
 0.476038   0.879425    ⋅         ⋅ 
 0.140615  -0.272203   0.95191    ⋅ 
 0.363825   0.384274  -0.341334  0.776824

julia> pred = rand(m(4))  # also works!
(y = [0.44037889402215297, 1.5938652701305567, -0.23702427205378396, -0.5424312905721139], σ = [1.1175273174818694, 1.7836751630330654, 1.3148335815282792, 0.3861023795641398], ŷ = [0.3940654399522521, 0.8021362778335628, 0.3654790805746502, -1.595705932814744], L = [1.0 0.0 0.0 0.0; 0.4261101513982992 0.9046712877478309 0.0 0.0; 0.2419199606694756 -0.6653662683891962 0.7062311671963476 0.0; -0.07132419227849153 -0.057620246988085724 0.37930698942361735 0.920716554921896])

julia> post = sample(DynamicHMCChain, m(4) | (y=pred.y,), 1_000)
ERROR: StackOverflowError:
Stacktrace:
 [1] xform(μ::Pushforward{TransformVariables.CorrCholeskyFactor, ProductMeasure{MappedArrays.ReadonlyMappedArray{Lebesgue{ℝ}, 1, CartesianIndices{1, Tuple{Base.OneTo{Int64}}}, MeasureTheory.var"#24#25"{Lebesgue{ℝ}}}}}, _data::NamedTuple{(), Tuple{}})
   @ Soss ~/.julia/packages/Soss/9Knnt/src/primitives/xform.jl:134
 [2] xform(μ::Pushforward{TransformVariables.CorrCholeskyFactor, ProductMeasure{MappedArrays.ReadonlyMappedArray{Lebesgue{ℝ}, 1, CartesianIndices{1, Tuple{Base.OneTo{Int64}}}, MeasureTheory.var"#24#25"{Lebesgue{ℝ}}}}}) (repeats 79983 times)
   @ Soss ~/.julia/packages/Soss/9Knnt/src/primitives/xform.jl:135

The issue is xform calls representative on its argument and then calls xform on that, but after calling representative on LKJL, further calls to representative are idempotent, so we overflow. MeasureTheory defines TransformVariables.as for LKJL, so we just overload xform to point to that:

julia> using Soss: TransformVariables

julia> Soss.xform(d::LKJL, _data::NamedTuple=NamedTuple()) = TransformVariables.as(d);

julia> xform(LKJL(4, 2))
TransformVariables.CorrCholeskyFactor(4)

julia> post = sample(DynamicHMCChain, m(4) | (y=pred.y,), 1_000)
4000-element MultiChain with 4 chains and schema (σ = Vector{Float64}, ŷ = Vector{Float64}, L = UpperTriangular{Float64, Matrix{Float64}})
(σ = [0.85±0.66, 0.81±0.71, 0.84±0.51, 0.87±0.64], ŷ = [-0.01±0.85, 0.1±1.3, -0.21±1.1, -0.02±1.1], L = [1.0±0.0 0.007±0.33 0.049±0.35 -0.0±0.28; 0.0±0.0 0.942±0.078 0.039±0.3 0.02±0.34; 0.0±0.0 0.0±0.0 0.877±0.11 0.02±0.43; 0.0±0.0 0.0±0.0 0.0±0.0 0.77±0.17])

But while we expected L to be LowerTriangular, it's actually UpperTriangular:

julia> post.L[1]
4×4 UpperTriangular{Float64, Matrix{Float64}}:
 1.0  0.179572  -0.623481  -0.0554051
  ⋅   0.983745  -0.121416   0.15332
  ⋅    ⋅         0.772353   0.225203
  ⋅    ⋅          ⋅         0.960576

This happens because even though LKJL is adapted from AltDistributions.jl, and this is in the same ecosystem as TransformVariables.jl, CorrCholeskyFactor transforms to an UpperTriangular matrix, while LKJL works with a LowerTriangular matrix.

May 31 '21 12:05 sethaxen

Thanks @sethaxen. The LKJL here is in the very early stages, so I think this is very likely an issue with the implementation itself, so I've moved the issue to MeasureTheory. This is an important measure to have available, so I'll try to spend some time with it today. Hopefully it won't take too long, and I'm sure the detail you give above will be really helpful in getting this in place quickly.

BTW there are lots of (good, I think) changes on the way. I've added lots of comments to this file to better describe adding new parameterized measures: https://github.com/cscherrer/MeasureTheory.jl/blob/cs-keywordcalls/src/parameterized/normal.jl

May 31 '21 14:05 cscherrer

Thanks @sethaxen. The LKJL here is in the very early stages, so I think this is very likely an issue with the implementation itself, so I've moved the issue to MeasureTheory. This is an important measure to have available, so I'll try to spend some time with it today. Hopefully it won't take too long, and I'm sure the detail you give above will be really helpful in getting this in place quickly.

Great, thanks! Yes, I agree, especially since Distributions does not have this measure.

BTW there are lots of (good, I think) changes on the way. I've added lots of comments to this file to better describe adding new parameterized measures: https://github.com/cscherrer/MeasureTheory.jl/blob/cs-keywordcalls/src/parameterized/normal.jl

Looks great! I'm especially loving the keyword aliases.

May 31 '21 23:05 sethaxen

Actually, I think there is an error in the logdensity from LKJL, which was carried over from AltDistributions. Compare with https://github.com/JuliaStats/Distributions.jl/issues/1336 (I've verified the Jacobian determinant there with FiniteDifferences) and Stan's documentation on the density. Specifically, at https://github.com/cscherrer/MeasureTheory.jl/blob/v0.7.0/src/parameterized/LKJL.jl#L41, we have c = k + 1 + 2(η - 1), when it should be c = k + 2(η - 1).

Jun 01 '21 20:06 sethaxen