Keywords: poisson distribution |  poisson regression |  glm |  centering |  counterfactual plot |  regression |  interaction-term |  oceanic tools |  parameter correlation |  Download Notebook

## Contents

%matplotlib inline
import numpy as np
import scipy as sp
import matplotlib as mpl
import matplotlib.cm as cm
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import pandas as pd
pd.set_option('display.width', 500)
pd.set_option('display.max_columns', 100)
pd.set_option('display.notebook_repr_html', True)
import seaborn as sns
sns.set_style("whitegrid")
sns.set_context("poster")
import pymc3 as pm


From Mcelreath:

The island societies of Oceania provide a natural experiment in technological evolution. Different historical island populations possessed tool kits of different size. These kits include fish hooks, axes, boats, hand plows, and many other types of tools. A number of theories predict that larger populations will both develop and sustain more complex tool kits. So the natural variation in population size induced by natural variation in island size in Oceania provides a natural experiment to test these ideas. It’s also suggested that contact rates among populations effectively increase population size, as it’s relevant to technological evolution. So variation in contact rates among Oceanic societies is also relevant. (McElreath 313)

## Setting up the model and data

Some points to take into account:

• sample size is not umber of rows, after all this is a count model
• the data is small, so we will need regularizing to avoid overfitting
• outcome will be total_tools which we will model as proportional to log(population) as theory says it depends on order of magnitude
• number of tools incereases with contact rate
• we will, over multiple attempts, be testing the idea that the impact of population on tool counts is increased by high contact. This is an example of an interaction. Specifically this is a positive interaction between log(population) and contact.
df=pd.read_csv("data/islands.csv", sep=';')
df

culture population contact total_tools mean_TU
0 Malekula 1100 low 13 3.2
1 Tikopia 1500 low 22 4.7
2 Santa Cruz 3600 low 24 4.0
3 Yap 4791 high 43 5.0
4 Lau Fiji 7400 high 33 5.0
5 Trobriand 8000 high 19 4.0
6 Chuuk 9200 high 40 3.8
7 Manus 13000 low 28 6.6
8 Tonga 17500 high 55 5.4
9 Hawaii 275000 low 71 6.6
df['logpop']=np.log(df.population)
df['clevel']=(df.contact=='high')*1
df

culture population contact total_tools mean_TU logpop clevel
0 Malekula 1100 low 13 3.2 7.003065 0
1 Tikopia 1500 low 22 4.7 7.313220 0
2 Santa Cruz 3600 low 24 4.0 8.188689 0
3 Yap 4791 high 43 5.0 8.474494 1
4 Lau Fiji 7400 high 33 5.0 8.909235 1
5 Trobriand 8000 high 19 4.0 8.987197 1
6 Chuuk 9200 high 40 3.8 9.126959 1
7 Manus 13000 low 28 6.6 9.472705 0
8 Tonga 17500 high 55 5.4 9.769956 1
9 Hawaii 275000 low 71 6.6 12.524526 0

Lets write down the model we plan to fit.

### M1

The $\beta$s have strongly regularizing priors on them, because the sample is small, while the $\alpha$ prior is essentially a flat prior.

## Implementation in pymc

import theano.tensor as t
with pm.Model() as m1:
betap = pm.Normal("betap", 0, 1)
betac = pm.Normal("betac", 0, 1)
betapc = pm.Normal("betapc", 0, 1)
alpha = pm.Normal("alpha", 0, 100)
loglam = alpha + betap*df.logpop + betac*df.clevel + betapc*df.clevel*df.logpop
y = pm.Poisson("ntools", mu=t.exp(loglam), observed=df.total_tools)


with m1:
trace=pm.sample(10000, njobs=2)

Auto-assigning NUTS sampler...
Multiprocess sampling (2 chains in 2 jobs)
NUTS: [alpha, betapc, betac, betap]
Sampling 2 chains: 100%|██████████| 21000/21000 [01:17<00:00, 269.30draws/s]
The acceptance probability does not match the target. It is 0.88659413662, but should be close to 0.8. Try to increase the number of tuning steps.

pm.summary(trace)

mean sd mc_error hpd_2.5 hpd_97.5 n_eff Rhat
betap 0.264372 0.035345 0.000443 0.194924 0.333177 6225.835834 1.000744
betac -0.083529 0.838570 0.009645 -1.700037 1.597633 6954.452047 1.000067
betapc 0.042019 0.091893 0.001062 -0.147786 0.214488 6987.273344 1.000076
alpha 0.934902 0.366691 0.004492 0.208745 1.645146 6253.602039 1.000709
pm.traceplot(trace);

//anaconda/envs/py3l/lib/python3.6/site-packages/matplotlib/axes/_base.py:3449: MatplotlibDeprecationWarning:
The ymin argument was deprecated in Matplotlib 3.0 and will be removed in 3.2. Use bottom instead.
alternative='bottom', obj_type='argument')


pm.autocorrplot(trace);


Our traces an autocorrelations look pretty good. pymc3 does quick work on the model

### Posteriors

pm.plot_posterior(trace);


Looking at the posteriors reveals something interesting. The posterior for $\beta_p$ is, as expected from theory, showing a positive effect. The posterior is fairly tightly constrained. The posteriors for $\beta_c$ and $\beta_{pc}$ both overlap 0 substantially, and seem comparatively poorly constrained.

At this point you might be willing to say that there is no substantial effect of contact rate, directly or through the interaction.

You would be wrong.

### Posterior check with counterfactual predictions.

Lets get $\lambda$ traces for high-contact and low contact

lamlow = lambda logpop: trace['alpha']+trace['betap']*logpop
lamhigh = lambda logpop: trace['alpha']+(trace['betap'] + trace['betapc'])*logpop + trace['betac']


Now let us see what happens at an intermediate log(pop) of 8:

sns.distplot(lamhigh(8) - lamlow(8));
plt.axvline(0);

//anaconda/envs/py3l/lib/python3.6/site-packages/matplotlib/axes/_axes.py:6499: MatplotlibDeprecationWarning:
The 'normed' kwarg was deprecated in Matplotlib 2.1 and will be removed in 3.1. Use 'density' instead.
alternative="'density'", removal="3.1")


We can see evidence of a fairly strong positive effect of contact in this “counterfactual posterior”, with most of the weight above 0.

So what happened?

### Posterior scatter plots

We make posterior scatter plots and this give us the answer.

def postscat(trace, thevars):
d={}
for v in thevars:
d[v] = trace.get_values(v)
df = pd.DataFrame.from_dict(d)
return sns.pairplot(df)

postscat(trace,trace.varnames)

<seaborn.axisgrid.PairGrid at 0x116913160>


Look at the very strong negative correlations between $\alpha$ and $\beta_p$, and the very strong ones between $\beta_c$ and $\beta_{pc}$. The latter is the cause for the 0-overlaps. When $\beta_c$ is high, $\beta_{pc}$ must be low, and vice-versa. As a result, its not enough to observe just the marginal uncertainty of each parameter; you must look at the joint uncertainty of the correlated variables.

You would have seen that this might be a problem if you looked at $n_{eff}$:

pm.effective_n(trace)

{'alpha': 6253.6020387847238,
'betac': 6954.4520465741789,
'betap': 6225.8358335534804,
'betapc': 6987.2733444159694}


## Fixing by centering

As usual, centering the log-population fixes things:

df.logpop_c = df.logpop - df.logpop.mean()

  """Entry point for launching an IPython kernel.

with pm.Model() as m1c:
betap = pm.Normal("betap", 0, 1)
betac = pm.Normal("betac", 0, 1)
betapc = pm.Normal("betapc", 0, 1)
alpha = pm.Normal("alpha", 0, 100)
loglam = alpha + betap*df.logpop_c + betac*df.clevel + betapc*df.clevel*df.logpop_c
y = pm.Poisson("ntools", mu=t.exp(loglam), observed=df.total_tools)

with m1c:
trace1c = pm.sample(10000, njobs=2)

Auto-assigning NUTS sampler...
Multiprocess sampling (2 chains in 2 jobs)
NUTS: [alpha, betapc, betac, betap]
Sampling 2 chains: 100%|██████████| 21000/21000 [00:16<00:00, 1284.28draws/s]

pm.effective_n(trace1c)

{'alpha': 13059.09068128995,
'betac': 13486.057010456128,
'betap': 14787.07665103561,
'betapc': 14659.70637220611}

pm.summary(trace1c)

mean sd mc_error hpd_2.5 hpd_97.5 n_eff Rhat
betap 0.263160 0.035343 0.000270 0.191687 0.330985 14787.076651 0.999950
betac 0.285020 0.116811 0.000988 0.051495 0.510018 13486.057010 0.999965
betapc 0.064929 0.168961 0.001466 -0.270487 0.394762 14659.706372 1.000043
alpha 3.311022 0.089226 0.000771 3.140614 3.491820 13059.090681 0.999956
postscat(trace1c,trace1c.varnames)

<seaborn.axisgrid.PairGrid at 0x111642160>


pm.plot_posterior(trace1c);


How do we decide whether the interaction is significant or not? We’ll use model comparison to achieve this!