Related papers: Free Energy Methods for Bayesian Inference: Effici…

We introduce a generalised micro-macro Markov chain Monte Carlo (mM-MCMC) method with pseudo-marginal approximation to the free energy, that is able to accelerate sampling of the microscopic Gibbs distributions when there is a time-scale…

Many scientific and engineering problems require to perform Bayesian inferences in function spaces, in which the unknowns are of infinite dimension. In such problems, many standard Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms become arbitrary…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods require a large number of samples to approximate a posterior distribution, which can be costly when the likelihood or prior is expensive to evaluate. The number of samples can be reduced if we can…

Bayesian inference in deep neural networks is challenging due to the high-dimensional, strongly multi-modal parameter posterior density landscape. Markov chain Monte Carlo approaches asymptotically recover the true posterior but are…

Bayesian low-rank matrix factorization techniques have become an essential tool for relational data analysis and matrix completion. A standard approach is to assign zero-mean Gaussian priors on the columns or rows of factor matrices to…

We introduce a new class of Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods, which we call free energy SMC. This class is inspired by free energy methods, which originate from Physics, and where one samples from a biased distribution such that a given…

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…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are commonly used for their versatility in sampling from complicated probability distributions. However, as the dimension of the distribution gets larger, the computational costs for a satisfactory…

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…

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…

This paper proposes a new randomized strategy for adaptive MCMC using Bayesian optimization. This approach applies to non-differentiable objective functions and trades off exploration and exploitation to reduce the number of potentially…

This paper focuses on variational inference with intractable likelihood functions that can be unbiasedly estimated. A flexible variational approximation based on Gaussian mixtures is developed, by adopting the mixture population Monte Carlo…

We consider the efficient use of an approximation within Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), with subsequent importance sampling (IS) correction of the Markov chain inexact output, leading to asymptotically exact inference. We detail…

We consider posterior sampling in the very common Bayesian hierarchical model in which observed data depends on high-dimensional latent variables that, in turn, depend on relatively few hyperparameters. When the full conditional over the…

The resolution of many large-scale inverse problems using MCMC methods requires a step of drawing samples from a high dimensional Gaussian distribution. While direct Gaussian sampling techniques, such as those based on Cholesky…

When working with multimodal Bayesian posterior distributions, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms have difficulty moving between modes, and default variational or mode-based approximate inferences will understate posterior…

The multiple range random walk algorithm recently proposed by Wang and Landau [Phys. Rev. Lett. 86, 2050 (2001)] is adapted to the computation of free energy profiles for molecular systems along reaction coordinates. More generally, we show…

One of the well-known challenges in optimal experimental design is how to efficiently estimate the nested integrations of the expected information gain. The Gaussian approximation and associated importance sampling have been shown to be…

Recent developments in big data and analytics research have produced an abundance of large data sets that are too big to be analyzed in their entirety, due to limits on computer memory or storage capacity. To address these issues,…

We study the problem of sampling from the power posterior distribution in Bayesian Gaussian mixture models, a robust version of the classical posterior. This power posterior is known to be non-log-concave and multi-modal, which leads to…