Related papers: On some difficulties with a posterior probability …
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a powerful methodology for the approximation of posterior distributions. However, the iterative nature of MCMC does not naturally facilitate its use with modern highly parallel computation on HPC and cloud…
We propose algorithms for addressing the bias of the posterior mean when used as an estimator of parameters. These algorithms build upon the recently proposed Bayesian infinitesimal jackknife approximation (Giordano and Broderick (2023))…
Using Markov chain Monte Carlo to sample from posterior distributions was the key innovation which made Bayesian data analysis practical. Notoriously, however, MCMC is hard to tune, hard to diagnose, and hard to parallelize. This…
A large number of statistical models are "doubly-intractable": the likelihood normalising term, which is a function of the model parameters, is intractable, as well as the marginal likelihood (model evidence). This means that standard…
For large model spaces, the potential entrapment of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) based methods with spike-and-slab priors poses significant challenges in posterior computation in regression models. On the other hand, maximum a posteriori…
While MCMC methods have become a main work-horse for Bayesian inference, scaling them to large distributed datasets is still a challenge. Embarrassingly parallel MCMC strategies take a divide-and-conquer stance to achieve this by writing…
In recent years, the shortcomings of Bayesian posteriors as inferential devices have received increased attention. A popular strategy for fixing them has been to instead target a Gibbs measure based on losses that connect a parameter of…
In the following article we consider approximate Bayesian parameter inference for observation driven time series models. Such statistical models appear in a wide variety of applications, including econometrics and applied mathematics. This…
Scientific analyses often rely on slow, but accurate forward models for observable data conditioned on known model parameters. While various emulation schemes exist to approximate these slow calculations, these approaches are only safe if…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms have become powerful tools for Bayesian inference. However, they do not scale well to large-data problems. Divide-and-conquer strategies, which split the data into batches and, for each batch, run…
Recent research has led to the development of MCMC algorithms with likelihood-informed proposals when targeting posterior distributions supported on discrete state spaces. Our work is placed within this field and puts forward a new MCMC…
Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) are a fundamental model for sequential decision-making under uncertainty. However, many verification and synthesis problems for POMDPs are undecidable or intractable. Most prominently,…
Selection among alternative theoretical models given an observed data set is an important challenge in many areas of physics and astronomy. Reversible-jump Markov chain Monte Carlo (RJMCMC) is an extremely powerful technique for performing…
Estimating the predictive uncertainty of a Bayesian learning model is critical in various decision-making problems, e.g., reinforcement learning, detecting adversarial attack, self-driving car. As the model posterior is almost always…
Combining several (sample approximations of) distributions, which we term sub-posteriors, into a single distribution proportional to their product, is a common challenge. Occurring, for instance, in distributed 'big data' problems, or when…
The Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm is a widely recognised as an efficient method for sampling a specified posterior distribution. However, when the posterior is multi-modal, conventional MCMC algorithms either tend to become…
Bayesian analysis often concerns an evaluation of models with different dimensionality as is necessary in, for example, model selection or mixture models. To facilitate this evaluation, transdimensional Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)…
This work presents a novel posterior inference method for models with intractable evidence and likelihood functions. Error-guided likelihood-free MCMC, or EG-LF-MCMC in short, has been developed for scientific applications, where a…
Performing Bayesian inference via Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) can be exceedingly expensive when posterior evaluations invoke the evaluation of a computationally expensive model, such as a system of partial differential equations. In…
We derive some simple relations that demonstrate how the posterior convergence rate is related to two driving factors: a "penalized divergence" of the prior, which measures the ability of the prior distribution to propose a nonnegligible…