Related papers: Approximation algorithms for the normalizing const…
Randomized approximation algorithms for many #P-complete problems (such as the partition function of a Gibbs distribution, the volume of a convex body, the permanent of a $\{0,1\}$-matrix, and many others) reduce to creating random…
We introduce innovative algorithms for computing exact or approximate (minimum-norm) solutions to $Ax=b$ or the {\it normal equation} $A^TAx=A^Tb$, where $A$ is an $m \times n$ real matrix of arbitrary rank. We present more efficient…
We give a new explicitly invertible approximation of the normal cumulative distribution function: $\Phi(x) \simeq 1/2 + 1/2 \sqrt{1-{e}^{-x^2\frac{17+{x}^{2}}{26.694+2x^2}}}$, $\forall x \ge 0$, with absolute error $<4.00\cdot 10^{-5}$,…
Let $\pi_{0}$ and $\pi_{1}$ be two distributions on the Borel space $(\mathbb{R}^{d},\mathcal{B}(\mathbb{R}^{d}))$. Any measurable function $T:\mathbb{R}^{d}\rightarrow\mathbb{R}^{d}$ such that $Y=T(X)\sim\pi_{1}$ if $X\sim\pi_{0}$ is…
There are well established reductions between combinatorial sampling and counting problems (Jerrum, Valiant, Vazirani TCS 1986). Building off of a very recent parallel algorithm utilizing this connection (Liu, Yin, Zhang arxiv 2024), we…
We consider observations $(X,y)$ from single index models with unknown link function, Gaussian covariates and a regularized M-estimator $\hat\beta$ constructed from convex loss function and regularizer. In the regime where sample size $n$…
Probability distributions supported on the simplex enjoy a wide range of applications across statistics and machine learning. Recently, a novel family of such distributions has been discovered: the continuous categorical. This family enjoys…
The Gumbel trick is a method to sample from a discrete probability distribution, or to estimate its normalizing partition function. The method relies on repeatedly applying a random perturbation to the distribution in a particular way, each…
We are concerned with obtaining well-calibrated output distributions from regression models. Such distributions allow us to quantify the uncertainty that the model has regarding the predicted target value. We introduce the novel concept of…
This paper presents different recursive formulas for computing the marginals and the normalizing constant of a Gibbs distribution $\pi$: The common thread is the use of the underlying Markov properties of such processes. The procedures are…
Systems with a long-term stationary state that possess as a spatio-temporally fluctuation quantity $\beta$ can be described by a superposition of several statistics, a "super statistics". We consider first, the Gamma, log-normal and…
We present a new generalization of the bin covering problem that is known to be a strongly NP-hard problem. In our generalization there is a positive constant $\Delta$, and we are given a set of items each of which has a positive size. We…
We propose a general algorithm for approximating nonstandard Bayesian posterior distributions. The algorithm minimizes the Kullback-Leibler divergence of an approximating distribution to the intractable posterior distribution. Our method…
Gibbs random fields play an important role in statistics, however, the resulting likelihood is typically unavailable due to an intractable normalizing constant. Composite likelihoods offer a principled means to construct useful…
Normalizing constant (also called partition function, Bayesian evidence, or marginal likelihood) is one of the central goals of Bayesian inference, yet most of the existing methods are both expensive and inaccurate. Here we develop a new…
Exactification is the process of obtaining exact values of a function from its complete asymptotic expansion. Here Stirling's approximation for the logarithm of the gamma function or $\ln \Gamma(z)$ is derived completely whereby it is…
We consider the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model of spin glasses at high-temperature and no external field, and study the problem of sampling from the Gibbs distribution $\mu$ in polynomial time. We prove that, for any inverse temperature…
We present a novel method for reducing the computational complexity of rigorously estimating the partition functions (normalizing constants) of Gibbs (Boltzmann) distributions, which arise ubiquitously in probabilistic graphical models. A…
An algorithm for sampling exactly from the normal distribution is given. The algorithm reads some number of uniformly distributed random digits in a given base and generates an initial portion of the representation of a normal deviate in…
We present an algorithm for doing Gibbs sampling on a quantum computer. The algorithm combines phase estimation for a Szegedy operator, and Grover's algorithm. For any $\epsilon>0$, the algorithm will sample a probability distribution in…