Related papers: An Empirical Analysis of Likelihood-Weighting Simu…
Stochastic simulation approaches perform probabilistic inference in Bayesian networks by estimating the probability of an event based on the frequency that the event occurs in a set of simulation trials. This paper describes the evidence…
Importance-weighting is a popular and well-researched technique for dealing with sample selection bias and covariate shift. It has desirable characteristics such as unbiasedness, consistency and low computational complexity. However,…
A number of algorithms have been developed to solve probabilistic inference problems on belief networks. These algorithms can be divided into two main groups: exact techniques which exploit the conditional independence revealed when the…
The marginal likelihood is a central tool for drawing Bayesian inference about the number of components in mixture models. It is often approximated since the exact form is unavailable. A bias in the approximation may be due to an incomplete…
Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising performance across various tasks. However, their autoregressive decoding process poses significant challenges for efficient deployment on existing AI hardware. Quantization alleviates memory…
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)…
Bias in datasets can be very detrimental for appropriate statistical estimation. In response to this problem, importance weighting methods have been developed to match any biased distribution to its corresponding target unbiased…
Motivated by real-world situations found in high energy particle physics, we consider a generalisation of the likelihood-ratio estimation task to a quasiprobabilistic setting where probability densities can be negative. By extension, 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…
We present two Monte Carlo sampling algorithms for probabilistic inference that guarantee polynomial-time convergence for a larger class of network than current sampling algorithms provide. These new methods are variants of the known…
Several recently developed methods have the potential to harness machine learning in the pursuit of target quantities inspired by causal inference, including inverse weighting, doubly robust estimating equations and substitution estimators…
This paper proposes niching importance sampling, a framework that combines concepts from reliability analysis, e.g. Markov chains, importance sampling, and relative cross entropy minimisation, with niching techniques from evolutionary…
We study lifted weight learning of Markov logic networks. We show that there is an algorithm for maximum-likelihood learning of 2-variable Markov logic networks which runs in time polynomial in the domain size. Our results are based on…
Simulating sampling algorithms with people has proven a useful method for efficiently probing and understanding their mental representations. We propose that the same methods can be used to study the representations of Large Language Models…
The partitioning of data for estimation and calibration critically impacts the performance of propensity score based estimators like inverse probability weighting (IPW) and double/debiased machine learning (DML) frameworks. We extend recent…
This paper explores Maximum Likelihood in parametric models in the context of Sanov type Large Deviation Probabilities. MLE in parametric models under weighted sampling is shown to be associated with the minimization of a specific…
For complex latent variable models, the likelihood function is not available in closed form. In this context, a popular method to perform parameter estimation is Importance Weighted Variational Inference. It essentially maximizes the…
Causal inference with time-to-event outcomes is fundamental in various scientific studies. In a static setup with fitted propensity scores, weighted Kaplan-Meier estimation for survival probabilities and weighted Breslow-Peto estimation for…
Based on a weighted knowledge graph to represent first-order knowledge and combining it with a probabilistic model, we propose a methodology for the creation of a medical knowledge network (MKN) in medical diagnosis. When a set of symptoms…
We calibrate a Natural History Model, which is a class of computer simulator used in the health industry, and here has been used to characterise bowel cancer incidence for the UK. The simulator tracks the development of bowel cancer in a…