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A system to update estimates from a sequence of probability distributions is presented. The aim of the system is to quickly produce estimates with a user-specified bound on the Monte Carlo error. The estimates are based upon weighted…

We introduce Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms based on numerical approximations of piecewise-deterministic Markov processes obtained with the framework of splitting schemes. We present unadjusted as well as adjusted algorithms,…

Computing smoothing distributions, the distributions of one or more states conditional on past, present, and future observations is a recurring problem when operating on general hidden Markov models. The aim of this paper is to provide a…

Adaptive importance sampling (AIS) methods provide a useful alternative to Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms for performing inference of intractable distributions. Population Monte Carlo (PMC) algorithms constitute a family of AIS…

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a powerful Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method for performing approximate inference in complex probabilistic models of continuous variables. In common with many MCMC methods, however, the standard HMC…

Doubly intractable distributions arise in many settings, for example in Markov models for point processes and exponential random graph models for networks. Bayesian inference for these models is challenging because they involve intractable…

Recent advances in machine learning have led to the development of new methods for enhancing Monte Carlo methods such as Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and importance sampling (IS). One such method is normalizing flows, which use a neural…

Parameter estimation for the truncated skew-normal distribution is challenging, as truncation introduces additional nonlinearity into the likelihood function and often leads to numerical instability in existing estimation procedures. In…

Practitioners of Bayesian statistics have long depended on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) to obtain samples from intractable posterior distributions. Unfortunately, MCMC algorithms are typically serial, and do not scale to the large…

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is an efficient method of simulating smooth distributions and has motivated the widely used No-U-turn Sampler (NUTS) and software Stan. We build on NUTS and the technique of "unbiased sampling" to design HMC…

The problem of optimally scaling the proposal distribution in a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm is critical to the quality of the generated samples. Much work has gone into obtaining such results for various Metropolis-Hastings (MH)…

We develop approximate estimation methods for exponential random graph models (ERGMs), whose likelihood is proportional to an intractable normalizing constant. The usual approach approximates this constant with Monte Carlo simulations,…

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…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods provide consistent of integrals as the number of iterations goes to infinity. MCMC estimators are generally biased after any fixed number of iterations. We propose to remove this bias by using…

In the setting of entangled single-sample distributions, the goal is to estimate some common parameter shared by a family of distributions, given one \emph{single} sample from each distribution. We study mean estimation and linear…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have not been broadly adopted in Bayesian neural networks (BNNs). This paper initially reviews the main challenges in sampling from the parameter posterior of a neural network via MCMC. Such…

We derive a novel variational expectation maximization approach based on truncated posterior distributions. Truncated distributions are proportional to exact posteriors within subsets of a discrete state space and equal zero otherwise. The…

We introduce a gradient-based learning method to automatically adapt Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) proposal distributions to intractable targets. We define a maximum entropy regularised objective function, referred to as generalised speed…

We propose Adaptive Incremental Mixture Markov chain Monte Carlo (AIMM), a novel approach to sample from challenging probability distributions defined on a general state-space. While adaptive MCMC methods usually update a parametric…

In Bayesian inference, predictive distributions are typically in the form of samples generated via Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) or related algorithms. In this paper, we conduct a systematic analysis of how to make and evaluate…