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We propose a stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (SG-MCMC) algorithm for scalable inference in mixed-membership stochastic blockmodels (MMSB). Our algorithm is based on the stochastic gradient Riemannian Langevin sampler and…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are often used for approximate inference inside learning, but their slow mixing can be difficult to diagnose and the approximations can seriously degrade learning. To alleviate these issues, we…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are generally regarded as the gold standard technique for Bayesian inference. They are theoretically well-understood and conceptually simple to apply in practice. The drawback of MCMC is that in…
The stochastic block model is able to generate different network partitions, ranging from traditional assortative communities to disassortative structures. Since the degree-corrected stochastic block model does not specify which mixing…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms provide a very general recipe for estimating properties of complicated distributions. While their use has become commonplace and there is a large literature on MCMC theory and practice, MCMC users…
This work presents an efficient approach for accelerating multilevel Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling for large-scale problems using low-fidelity machine learning models. While conventional techniques for large-scale Bayesian…
From basic considerations of the Lie group that preserves a target probability measure, we derive the Barker, Metropolis, and ensemble Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms, as well as variants of waste-recycling Metropolis-Hastings…
We present a Markov chain Monte Carlo scheme based on merges and splits of groups that is capable of efficiently sampling from the posterior distribution of network partitions, defined according to the stochastic block model (SBM). We…
The Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm is a widely recognised as an efficient method for sampling a specified posterior distribution. However, when the posterior is multi-modal, conventional MCMC algorithms either tend to become…
Markov chain Monte Carlo methods are a powerful tool for sampling equilibrium configurations in complex systems. One problem these methods often face is slow convergence over large energy barriers. In this work, we propose a novel method…
A fundamental problem in network analysis is clustering the nodes into groups which share a similar connectivity pattern. Existing algorithms for community detection assume the knowledge of the number of clusters or estimate it a priori…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling is an important and commonly used tool for the analysis of hierarchical models. Nevertheless, practitioners generally have two options for MCMC: utilize existing software that generates a black-box…
We propose a very fast approximate Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling framework that is applicable to a large class of sparse Bayesian inference problems, where the computational cost per iteration in several models is of order…
Probabilistic models are conceptually powerful tools for finding structure in data, but their practical effectiveness is often limited by our ability to perform inference in them. Exact inference is frequently intractable, so approximate…
In this paper, we introduce a hierarchical extension of the stochastic blockmodel to identify multilevel community structures in networks. We also present a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and a variational Bayes algorithm to fit the model…
Performing reliable Bayesian inference on a big data scale is becoming a keystone in the modern era of machine learning. A workhorse class of methods to achieve this task are Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms and their design to…
In this paper, we propose a new stochastic optimization algorithm for Bayesian inference based on multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) methods. In Bayesian statistics, biased estimators of the model evidence have been often used as stochastic…
As it has become common to use many computer cores in routine applications, finding good ways to parallelize popular algorithms has become increasingly important. In this paper, we present a parallelization scheme for Markov chain Monte…
We propose a weighting scheme for the proposals within Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms and show how this can improve statistical efficiency at no extra computational cost. These methods are most powerful when combined with…
Exponential random graph models are extremely difficult models to handle from a statistical viewpoint, since their normalising constant, which depends on model parameters, is available only in very trivial cases. We show how inference can…