Exact Goodness‐of‐Fit Testing for the Ising Model. (4th November 2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Martín del Campo, Abraham; Cepeda, Sarah; Uhler, Caroline
• Is Part Of: Scandinavian journal of statistics. Volume 44:Number 2(2017:Jun.)
• Page Start: 285
• Page End: 306
• Publication Date: 2016-11-04
• Subjects: goodness‐of‐fit testing -- Ising model -- Markov Chain Monte Carlo; Statistics -- Periodicals; 310
• DOI: 10.1111/sjos.12251
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0303-6898

Abstract

Abstract: The Ising model is one of the simplest and most famous models of interacting systems. It was originally proposed to model ferromagnetic interactions in statistical physics and is now widely used to model spatial processes in many areas such as ecology, sociology, and genetics, usually without testing its goodness of fit. Here, we propose various test statistics and an exact goodness‐of‐fit test for the finite‐lattice Ising model. The theory of Markov bases has been developed in algebraic statistics for exact goodness‐of‐fit testing using a Monte Carlo approach. However, finding a Markov basis is often computationally intractable. Thus, we develop a Monte Carlo method for exact goodness‐of‐fit testing for the Ising model that avoids computing a Markov basis and also leads to a better connectivity of the Markov chain and hence to a faster convergence. We show how this method can be applied to analyze the spatial organization of receptors on the cell membrane.