Related papers: Control Variates for Reversible MCMC Samplers

Motion planning for autonomous robots in dynamic environments poses numerous challenges due to uncertainties in the robot's dynamics and interaction with other agents. Sampling-based MPC approaches, such as Model Predictive Path Integral…

Sparsity has become a key concept for solving of high-dimensional inverse problems using variational regularization techniques. Recently, using similar sparsity-constraints in the Bayesian framework for inverse problems by encoding them in…

Many probabilistic models of interest in scientific computing and machine learning have expensive, black-box likelihoods that prevent the application of standard techniques for Bayesian inference, such as MCMC, which would require access to…

Posterior predictive p-values (ppps) have become popular tools for Bayesian model assessment, being general-purpose and easy to use. However, interpretation can be difficult because their distribution is not uniform under the hypothesis…

This paper develops a flexible method for decreasing the variance of estimators for complex experiment effect metrics (e.g. ratio metrics) while retaining asymptotic unbiasedness. This method uses the auxiliary information about the…

In this paper, we propose a variance reduction approach for Markov chains based on additive control variates and the minimization of an appropriate estimate for the asymptotic variance. We focus on the particular case when control variates…

Counting experiments often rely on Monte Carlo simulations for predictions of Poisson expectations. The accompanying uncertainty from the finite Monte Carlo sample size can be incorporated into parameter estimation by modifying the Poisson…

We consider the problem of estimating rare event probabilities, focusing on systems whose evolution is governed by differential equations with uncertain input parameters. If the system dynamics is expensive to compute, standard sampling…

In this paper we propose and discuss variance reduction techniques for the estimation of quantiles of the output of a complex model with random input parameters. These techniques are based on the use of a reduced model, such as a metamodel…

Since their introduction in Abadie and Gardeazabal (2003), Synthetic Control (SC) methods have quickly become one of the leading methods for estimating causal effects in observational studies in settings with panel data. Formal discussions…

We study parameter inference in large-scale latent variable models. We first propose an unified treatment of online inference for latent variable models from a non-canonical exponential family, and draw explicit links between several…

In the context of the usual calibration model, we consider the case in which the independent variable is unobservable, but a pre-fixed value on its surrogate is available. Thus, considering controlled variables and assuming that the…

Many generative models can be expressed as a differentiable function of random inputs drawn from some simple probability density. This framework includes both deep generative architectures such as Variational Autoencoders and a large class…

Autocorrelations in MCMC chains increase the variance of the estimators they produce. We propose the occlusion process to mitigate this problem. It is a process that sits upon an existing MCMC sampler, and occasionally replaces its samples…

In large-scale genomic applications vast numbers of molecular features are scanned in order to find a small number of candidates which are linked to a particular disease or phenotype. This is a variable selection problem in the "large p,…

This paper introduces a Bayesian framework that combines Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling, dimensionality reduction, and neural density estimation to efficiently handle inverse problems that (i) must be solved multiple times, and…

Monte Carlo (MC) sampling methods are widely applied in Bayesian inference, system simulation and optimization problems. The Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are a well-known class of MC methods which generate a Markov chain with…

This paper introduces a framework for speeding up Bayesian inference conducted in presence of large datasets. We design a Markov chain whose transition kernel uses an (unknown) fraction of (fixed size) of the available data that is randomly…

This paper studies the problem of estimating the covariance of a collection of vectors using only highly compressed measurements of each vector. An estimator based on back-projections of these compressive samples is proposed and analyzed. A…

Multi-model Monte Carlo methods, such as multi-level Monte Carlo (MLMC) and multifidelity Monte Carlo (MFMC), allow for efficient estimation of the expectation of a quantity of interest given a set of models of varying fidelities. Recently,…