Related papers: Computing the Bayesian Factor from a Markov chain …
Weinberg (2012) described a constructive algorithm for computing the marginal likelihood, Z, from a Markov chain simulation of the posterior distribution. Its key point is: the choice of an integration subdomain that eliminates subvolumes…
Computing the marginal likelihood or evidence is one of the core challenges in Bayesian analysis. While there are many established methods for estimating this quantity, they predominantly rely on using a large number of posterior samples…
In this paper, we present a method for computing the marginal likelihood, also known as the model likelihood or Bayesian evidence, from Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), or other sampled posterior distributions. In order to do this, one…
It is common practice to use Laplace approximations to compute marginal likelihoods in Bayesian versions of generalised linear models (GLM). Marginal likelihoods combined with model priors are then used in different search algorithms to…
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…
Many inference problems involve inferring the number $N$ of components in some region, along with their properties $\{\mathbf{x}_i\}_{i=1}^N$, from a dataset $\mathcal{D}$. A common statistical example is finite mixture modelling. In the…
We study Bayesian estimation of mixture models and argue in favor of fitting the marginal posterior distribution over component assignments directly, rather than Gibbs sampling from the joint posterior on components and parameters as is…
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…
Bayesian nonparametric inferential procedures based on Markov chain Monte Carlo marginal methods typically yield point estimates in the form of posterior expectations. Though very useful and easy to implement in a variety of statistical…
In many domains, we are interested in analyzing the structure of the underlying distribution, e.g., whether one variable is a direct parent of the other. Bayesian model-selection attempts to find the MAP model and use its structure to…
This paper develops a Bayesian computational platform at the interface between posterior sampling and optimization in models whose marginal likelihoods are difficult to evaluate. Inspired by adversarial optimization, namely Generative…
We present a new version of the truncated harmonic mean estimator (THAMES) for univariate or multivariate mixture models. The estimator computes the marginal likelihood from Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) samples, is consistent,…
We propose a general framework using spike-and-slab prior distributions to aid with the development of high-dimensional Bayesian inference. Our framework allows inference with a general quasi-likelihood function. We show that highly…
Exponential random graph models are an important tool in the statistical analysis of data. However, Bayesian parameter estimation for these models is extremely challenging, since evaluation of the posterior distribution typically involves…
Likelihood-free methods, such as approximate Bayesian computation, are powerful tools for practical inference problems with intractable likelihood functions. Markov chain Monte Carlo and sequential Monte Carlo variants of approximate…
Completely random measures provide a principled approach to creating flexible unsupervised models, where the number of latent features is infinite and the number of features that influence the data grows with the size of the data set. Due…
By mixing the target posterior distribution with a surrogate distribution, of which the normalizing constant is tractable, we propose a method for estimating the marginal likelihood using the Wang-Landau algorithm. We show that a faster…
Bayesian inference in the presence of an intractable likelihood function is computationally challenging. When following a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach to approximate the posterior distribution in this context, one typically…
We study Bayesian inference methods for solving linear inverse problems, focusing on hierarchical formulations where the prior or the likelihood function depend on unspecified hyperparameters. In practice, these hyperparameters are often…
We resurrect the infamous harmonic mean estimator for computing the marginal likelihood (Bayesian evidence) and solve its problematic large variance. The marginal likelihood is a key component of Bayesian model selection to evaluate model…