Related papers: Importance Sampling via Variational Optimization
Belief updating in Bayes nets, a well known computationally hard problem, has recently been approximated by several deterministic algorithms, and by various randomized approximation algorithms. Deterministic algorithms usually provide…
Modern stochastic optimization methods often rely on uniform sampling which is agnostic to the underlying characteristics of the data. This might degrade the convergence by yielding estimates that suffer from a high variance. A possible…
Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) have received an increased interest in the last years. In BNNs, a complete posterior distribution of the unknown weight and bias parameters of the network is produced during the training stage. This…
The paper analyzes theoretically and empirically the performance of likelihood weighting (LW) on a subset of nodes in Bayesian networks. The proposed scheme requires fewer samples to converge due to reduction in sampling variance. The…
Bayesian inference under a set of priors, called robust Bayesian analysis, allows for estimation of parameters within a model and quantification of epistemic uncertainty in quantities of interest by bounded (or imprecise) probability.…
Data clustering, including problems such as finding network communities, can be put into a systematic framework by means of a Bayesian approach. The application of Bayesian approaches to real problems can be, however, quite challenging. In…
This paper surveys some well-established approaches on the approximation of Bayes factors used in Bayesian model choice, mostly as covered in Chen et al. (2000). Our focus here is on methods that are based on importance sampling strategies…
A Bayesian network is a widely used probabilistic graphical model with applications in knowledge discovery and prediction. Learning a Bayesian network (BN) from data can be cast as an optimization problem using the well-known…
One of the core problems of modern statistics is to approximate difficult-to-compute probability densities. This problem is especially important in Bayesian statistics, which frames all inference about unknown quantities as a calculation…
We present an importance sampling algorithm that can produce realisations of Markovian epidemic models that exactly match observations, taken to be the number of a single event type over a period of time. The importance sampling can be used…
Recent work used importance sampling ideas for better variational bounds on likelihoods. We clarify the applicability of these ideas to pure probabilistic inference, by showing the resulting Importance Weighted Variational Inference (IWVI)…
Probability estimation of tree topologies is one of the fundamental tasks in phylogenetic inference. The recently proposed subsplit Bayesian networks (SBNs) provide a powerful probabilistic graphical model for tree topology probability…
Implementing Bayesian variable selection for linear Gaussian regression models for analysing high dimensional data sets is of current interest in many fields. In order to make such analysis operational, we propose a new sampling algorithm…
Importance sampling and Metropolis-Hastings sampling (of which Gibbs sampling is a special case) are two methods commonly used to sample multi-variate probability distributions (that is, Bayesian networks). Heretofore, the sampling of…
Sampling is an important tool for estimating large, complex sums and integrals over high dimensional spaces. For instance, important sampling has been used as an alternative to exact methods for inference in belief networks. Ideally, we…
Purpose: Machine learning is broadly used for clinical data analysis. Before training a model, a machine learning algorithm must be selected. Also, the values of one or more model parameters termed hyper-parameters must be set. Selecting…
In this paper we study simulation-based methods for estimating gradients in stochastic networks. We derive a new method of calculating weak derivative estimator using importance sampling transform, and our method has less computational cost…
This paper examines Bayesian belief network inference using simulation as a method for computing the posterior probabilities of network variables. Specifically, it examines the use of a method described by Henrion, called logic sampling,…
Importance sampling, which involves sampling from a probability density function (PDF) proportional to the product of an importance weight function and a base PDF, is a powerful technique with applications in variance reduction, biased or…
Importance sampling is a well developed method in statistics. Given a random variable $X$, the problem of estimating its expected value $\mu$ is addressed. The standard approach is to use the sample mean as an estimator $\bar x$. In…