English

Improving Gradient-guided Nested Sampling for Posterior Inference

Machine Learning 2023-12-08 v1 Computation Methodology Machine Learning

Abstract

We present a performant, general-purpose gradient-guided nested sampling algorithm, GGNS{\tt GGNS}, combining the state of the art in differentiable programming, Hamiltonian slice sampling, clustering, mode separation, dynamic nested sampling, and parallelization. This unique combination allows GGNS{\tt GGNS} to scale well with dimensionality and perform competitively on a variety of synthetic and real-world problems. We also show the potential of combining nested sampling with generative flow networks to obtain large amounts of high-quality samples from the posterior distribution. This combination leads to faster mode discovery and more accurate estimates of the partition function.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2312.03911,
  title  = {Improving Gradient-guided Nested Sampling for Posterior Inference},
  author = {Pablo Lemos and Nikolay Malkin and Will Handley and Yoshua Bengio and Yashar Hezaveh and Laurence Perreault-Levasseur},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2312.03911},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

10 pages, 5 figures. Code available at https://github.com/Pablo-Lemos/GGNS