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Bayesian inference with Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is challenging when the likelihood function is irregular and expensive to compute. We explore several sampling algorithms that make use of subset evaluations to reduce computational…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a sampling-based method for estimating features of probability distributions. MCMC methods produce a serially correlated, yet representative, sample from the desired distribution. As such it can be…
Probabilistic databases (PDBs) introduce uncertainty into relational databases by specifying probabilities for several possible instances. Traditionally, they are finite probability spaces over database instances. Such finite PDBs…
Inferring directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) from data via Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is computationally challenging in moderate-to-high dimensional settings because their discrete sampling space grows super-exponentially with the number…
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…
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…
Bayesian inference for doubly-intractable pairwise exponential graphical models typically involves variations of the exchange algorithm or approximate Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) samplers. However, existing methods for both classes of…
Probabilistic inferences distill knowledge from graphs to aid human make important decisions. Due to the inherent uncertainty in the model and the complexity of the knowledge, it is desirable to help the end-users understand the inference…
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…
The formal verification of large probabilistic models is important and challenging. Exploiting the concurrency that is often present is one way to address this problem. Here we study a restricted class of asynchronous distributed…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods asymptotically sample from complex probability distributions. The pseudo-marginal MCMC framework only requires an unbiased estimator of the unnormalized probability distribution function to construct…
Inference after model selection presents computational challenges when dealing with intractable conditional distributions. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a common method for sampling from these distributions, but its slow convergence…
Variable selection is a key issue when analyzing high-dimensional data. The explosion of data with large sample sizes and dimensionality brings new challenges to this problem in both inference accuracy and computational complexity. To…
In this article we propose a novel MCMC method based on deterministic transformations T: X x D --> X where X is the state-space and D is some set which may or may not be a subset of X. We refer to our new methodology as Transformation-based…
We address the problem of likelihood based inference for correlated diffusion processes using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques. Such a task presents two interesting problems. First, the construction of the MCMC scheme should…
Performing reliable Bayesian inference on a big data scale is becoming a keystone in the modern era of machine learning. A workhorse class of methods to achieve this task are Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms and their design to…
Probabilistic model checking can provide formal guarantees on the behavior of stochastic models relating to a wide range of quantitative properties, such as runtime, energy consumption or cost. But decision making is typically with respect…
To conduct Bayesian inference with large data sets, it is often convenient or necessary to distribute the data across multiple machines. We consider a likelihood function expressed as a product of terms, each associated with a subset of the…
Bayesian modelling and computational inference by Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a principled framework for large-scale uncertainty quantification, though is limited in practice by computational cost when implemented in the simplest…
In this article we consider computing expectations w.r.t.~probability laws associated to a certain class of stochastic systems. In order to achieve such a task, one must not only resort to numerical approximation of the expectation, but…