An Introduction to Psychologically Plausible Sampling Schemes for Approximating Bayesian Inference
Jian-Qiao Zhu, Nick Chater, Pablo León-Villagrá, Jake Spicer, Joakim Sundh, Adam N. Sanborn · Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023
The brain must make inferences about, and decisions concerning, a highly complex and unpredictable world, based on sparse evidence. An “ideal” normative approach to such challenges is often modeled in terms of Bayesian probabilistic inference. But for real-world problems of perception, motor control, categorization, language understanding, or commonsense reasoning, exact probabilistic calculations are computationally intractable. Instead, we suggest that the brain solves these hard probability problems approximately, by considering one, or a few, samples from the relevant distributions. Here we provide a gentle introduction to the various sampling algorithms that have been considered as the approximation used by the brain. We broadly summarize these algorithms according to their level of knowledge and their assumptions regarding the target distribution, noting their strengths and weaknesses, their previous applications to behavioural phenomena, as well as their psychological plausibility.