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New RooFit TestStatistics usage notes

Notes on the new RooFit::TestStatistics classes.

Date
December 2021
Author
Patrick Bos

RooFit::TestStatistics usage notes

The RooFit::TestStatistics namespace contains a major refactoring of the RooAbsTestStatistic-RooAbsOptTestStatistic-RooNLLVar inheritance tree into:

  1. statistics-based classes on the one hand;
  2. calculation/evaluation/optimization based classes on the other hand.

The motivation for this refactoring was also twofold:

  1. These test statistics classes make a cleaner separation of concerns than the existing RooAbsTestStatistic based tree and are hence more maintainable and future proof.
  2. They provided a place for us to try out new parallelized gradient calculation methods using the RooFit::MultiProcess module. See the usage example below on how to use this.

Statistics

The likelihood is the central unit on the statistics side. The RooAbsL class is implemented for four kinds of likelihoods: binned, unbinned, "subsidiary" (an optimization for numerical stability that gathers components like global observables) and "sum" (over multiple components of the other types), in the correspondingly named classes RooBinnedL, RooUnbinnedL, RooSubsidiaryL and RooSumL. These classes provide a evaluatePartition function that allows for computing them in parallelizable chunks that can be used by the calculator classes as they see fit.

On top of the likelihood classes, we also provide for convenience a likelihood builder buildLikelihood, as a free function in the namespace. This function analyzes the pdf and automatically constructs the proper likelihood, built up from the available RooAbsL subclasses.

The new classes are not per se meant to be used outside of RooMinimizer, although they can be. The main reason is that they do not behave as regular RooAbsReal objects, but have their own interface which was kept to the minimum necessary for interacting with RooMinimizer as an object that encodes purely the statistics concepts. However, we do provide the RooRealL class, which holds a RooAbsL object, but does inherit from RooAbsReal as well, so that it can be used in contexts where you would normally use a RooAbsReal (like for plotting).

Usage example: Create an unbinned likelihood object

It is possible to directly create RooAbsL based likelihood objects from a pdf and dataset, in this example a RooUnbinnedL type:

RooAbsPdf *pdf;
std::tie(pdf, data) = generate_some_unbinned_pdf_and_dataset(with, some, parameters);
Option_t Option_t TPoint TPoint const char GetTextMagnitude GetFillStyle GetLineColor GetLineWidth GetMarkerStyle GetTextAlign GetTextColor GetTextSize void data
Abstract interface for all probability density functions.
Definition RooAbsPdf.h:40
Container class to hold unbinned data.
Definition RooDataSet.h:57

However, most of the time, the user will not need or want such direct control over the type, but rather just let RooFit figure out what exact likelihood type (RooAbsL derived class) is best. For this situation, the buildLikelihood function was created that can be used (for instance) as:

std::shared_ptr<RooFit::TestStatistics::RooAbsL> likelihood = RooFit::TestStatistics::buildLikelihood(pdf, data);
std::unique_ptr< RooAbsL > buildLikelihood(RooAbsPdf *pdf, RooAbsData *data)
Delegating function to build a likelihood without additional arguments.

buildLikelihood actually returns a unique_ptr; storing the result in a shared_ptr as done here is just one possible use-case.

Usage example: Create a likelihood of a simultaneous PDF with constraint terms and global observables (and other optional arguments)

The RooAbsPdf::fitTo or RooAbsPdf::createNLL interfaces could take in a set of optional parameters as RooCmdArg objects. In TestStatistics::buildLikelihood, we have implemented 4 of these options as separate types while an additional one is supported as a simple string:

Using these parameters, creating a likelihood of a simultaneous pdf (i.e. a RooSimultaneous) with constrained terms and global observables can be done with:

simultaneous_pdf, data,
RooFit::TestStatistics::ConstrainedParameters(RooArgSet(/*YOUR CONSTRAINED PARAMETERS*/)),
RooFit::TestStatistics::GlobalObservables(RooArgSet(/*YOUR GLOBAL OBSERVABLES*/)));
RooArgSet is a container object that can hold multiple RooAbsArg objects.
Definition RooArgSet.h:55

The resulting object will be a RooSumL containing a RooSubsidiaryL with the constrained parameters and RooBinnedL or RooUnbinnedL components for each simultaneous pdf component (depending on whether they are binned or unbinned pdfs). Note that, just like for fitTo, the order of the parameters is arbitrary. The difference is that fitTo has a step to analyze the RooCmdArg optional parameters for their content dynamically at runtime, while in buildLikelihood the arguments are statically typed and so no further runtime analysis is needed.

As a side-note: one optional parameter of RooNLLVar that is not included in the RooAbsL tree is offsetting. Offsetting has instead been implemented in the calculators that we'll describe next. This is one of the consequences of the conceptual splitting of functionality into statistics and calculator classes. Offsetting is a feature of calculation in a fitting context; it enhances numerical precision by subtracting the initial likelihood value from the value that the minimizer sees, thus setting it to zero for the minimizer. Since this does not impact the derivative terms, it does not affect the fitting result, except for added numerical precision.

Calculators

RooFit::TestStatistics provides two abstract base classes for likelihood calculation: LikelihoodWrapper and LikelihoodGradientWrapper. These are used by the RooAbsMinimizerFcn implementation MinuitFcnGrad which expects them to, respectively, provide likelihood and likelihood gradient values for use by Minuit2 in fitting the pdf to the dataset.

The Wrappers can be implemented for different kinds of algorithms, or with different kinds of optimization "back-ends" in mind. One implementation of each is ready for use in RooFit currently:

  1. LikelihoodSerial is more or less simply a rewrite of the existing serial calculation of a RooNLLVar.
  2. LikelihoodGradientJob calculates the partial derivatives or the gradient in parallel on multiple CPUs/cores, based on RooFit::MultiProcess, which is a fork-based multi-processing task execution framework with dynamic load balancing.

Other possible implementations could use the GPU or external tools like TensorFlow.

The coupling of all these classes to RooMinimizer is made via the MinuitFcnGrad class, which owns the Wrappers that calculate the likelihood components.

Note: a second LikelihoodWrapper class called LikelihoodJob is also available. This class emulates the existing NumCPU(>1) functionality of the RooAbsTestStatistic tree, which is implemented based on RooRealMPFE. This class is not yet thoroughly tested and should not be considered production ready.

Usage example: <tt>MultiProcess</tt> enabled parallel gradient calculator

The main selling point of using RooFit::TestStatistics from a performance point of view is the implementation of the RooFit::MultiProcess based LikelihoodGradientJob calculator class. To use it, one should create a RooMinimizer using the new constructor that takes a RooAbsL-based likelihood instead of a RooAbsReal.

Taking any of the above created likelihood objects (as long as they are in a std::shared_ptr), we can create a RooMinimizer with parallel gradient calculation using:

std::shared_ptr<RooAbsL> likelihood = /* see examples above */;
RooMinimizer m(likelihood);
Wrapper class around ROOT::Fit:Fitter that provides a seamless interface between the minimizer functi...
TMarker m
Definition textangle.C:8

By default, RooFit::MultiProcess spins up as many workers as there are cores in the system (as detected by std::thread::hardware_concurrency()). To change the number of workers, call RooFit::MultiProcess::Config::setDefaultNWorkers(desired_N_workers) before creating the RooMinimizer.

As noted above, offsetting is purely a function of the RooMinimizer when using TestStatistics classes. Whereas with fitTo we can pass in a RooFit::Offset(true) optional RooCmdArg argument to activate offsetting, here we must do it on the minimizer as follows:

m.setOffsetting(true);

All existing functionality of the RooMinimizer can be used on TestStatistics likelihoods as well. For instance, running a migrad fit:

m.migrad()

Constant term optimization

The RooAbsTestStatistic based classes not only combine statistics and calculation, but also constant term optimization routines. These can be run on PDFs and datasets before starting a fit. They search the calculation graph for parts that are independent of the fit parameters, precalculates them, and adds them to (a clone of) the dataset so that these values can be used during calculation.

In RooFit::TestStatistics, we separated this functionality out into the ConstantTermsOptimizer class. In fact, it is not so much a class, as it is a collection of static functions that can be applied to any combination of pdf and dataset. This class does essentially the same as constOptimizeTestStatistic did on a RooNLLVar, except that it has been factored out into a separate class.

Usage example: apply constant term optimization on pdf and dataset inside a likelihood

Applying the default ConstantTermsOptimizer optimization routines on the pdf and dataset inside a RooAbsL likelihood is as simple as:

likelihood.constOptimizeTestStatistic();

This applies constant term optimization to the cloned pdf and dataset inside the likelihood object. It will not modify anything outside of the likelihood.

Optimization can also be activated through the minimizer, which may be more familiar to most users. Given the RooMinimizer object m as defined in the example above, we can do:

m.optimizeConst(2);

For the adventurous user, it is also possible to apply constant term optimization to a pdf and dataset directly without needing a likelihood object, e.g. given some RooArgSet set of observables normSet:

bool applyTrackingOpt = true;
ConstantTermsOptimizer::enableConstantTermsOptimization(&pdf, &normSet, dataset, applyTrackingOpt);

We refer to RooFit documentation for more about "tracking optimization" which can be enabled or disabled using the final boolean parameter.

Caveats

This package is still under development. Some functionality that users of RooAbsPdf::fitTo or RooAbsPdf::createNLL were used to has not yet been ported to this namespace. However, the functionality that is implemented has been tested thoroughly for a set of common usage patterns and should work as expected.

The classes implemented here will give the exact same numerical results for most fits. One notable exception is fitting simultaneous pdfs with a constrained term when using offsetting. Because offsetting is handled differently in the TestStatistics classes compared to the way it was done in the object returned from RooAbsPdf::createNLL (a RooAddition of an offset RooNLLVar and a non-offset RooConstraintSum, whereas RooSumL applies the offset to the total sum of its binned, unbinned and constraint components), we cannot always expect exactly equal results for fits with likelihood offsetting enabled.