Related papers: Parallelizing MCMC via Weierstrass Sampler

When working with multimodal Bayesian posterior distributions, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms have difficulty moving between modes, and default variational or mode-based approximate inferences will understate posterior…

Mutual independence is a key concept in statistics that characterizes the structural relationships between variables. Existing methods to investigate mutual independence rely on the definition of two competing models, one being nested into…

We develop a modular approach to Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling for unnormalized target densities. In this approach, Markov chains are constructed in parallel, each constrained to a subset of the target space. The Monte Carlo…

Bayesian computation crucially relies on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. In the case of massive data sets, running the Metropolis-Hastings sampler to draw from the posterior distribution becomes prohibitive due to the large…

Performing exact Bayesian inference for complex models is computationally intractable. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms can provide reliable approximations of the posterior distribution but are expensive for large datasets and…

Because of their multimodality, mixture posterior distributions are difficult to sample with standard Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. We propose a strategy to enhance the sampling of MCMC in this context, using a biasing procedure…

For large model spaces, the potential entrapment of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) based methods with spike-and-slab priors poses significant challenges in posterior computation in regression models. On the other hand, maximum a posteriori…

We propose a novel approximate inference algorithm that approximates a target distribution by amortising the dynamics of a user-selected MCMC sampler. The idea is to initialise MCMC using samples from an approximation network, apply the…

Yang et al. (2016) proved that the symmetric random walk Metropolis--Hastings algorithm for Bayesian variable selection is rapidly mixing under mild high-dimensional assumptions. We propose a novel MCMC sampler using an informed proposal…

Many probabilistic models of interest in scientific computing and machine learning have expensive, black-box likelihoods that prevent the application of standard techniques for Bayesian inference, such as MCMC, which would require access to…

Sampling from the full posterior distribution of high-dimensional non-linear, non-Gaussian latent dynamical models presents significant computational challenges. While Particle Gibbs (also known as conditional sequential Monte Carlo) is…

Posterior sampling is a task of central importance in Bayesian inference. For many applications in Bayesian meta-analysis and Bayesian transfer learning, the prior distribution is unknown and needs to be estimated from samples. In practice,…

We outline a procedure for jointly sampling substitution matrices and multiple sequence alignments, according to an approximate posterior distribution, using an MCMC-based algorithm. This procedure provides an efficient and simple method by…

The rapid development of computing power and efficient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation algorithms have revolutionized Bayesian statistics, making it a highly practical inference method in applied work. However, MCMC algorithms…

With larger data at their disposal, scientists are emboldened to tackle complex questions that require sophisticated statistical models. It is not unusual for the latter to have likelihood functions that elude analytical formulations. Even…

To conduct Bayesian inference with large data sets, it is often convenient or necessary to distribute the data across multiple machines. We consider a likelihood function expressed as a product of terms, each associated with a subset of the…

This paper presents an improved implicit sampling method for hierarchical Bayesian inverse problems. A widely used approach for sampling posterior distribution is based on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). However, the samples generated by…

In many problems, complex non-Gaussian and/or nonlinear models are required to accurately describe a physical system of interest. In such cases, Monte Carlo algorithms are remarkably flexible and extremely powerful approaches to solve such…

Bayesian deep learning counts on the quality of posterior distribution estimation. However, the posterior of deep neural networks is highly multi-modal in nature, with local modes exhibiting varying generalization performance. Given a…

We present a general framework for accelerating a large class of widely used Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. Our approach exploits fast, iterative approximations to the target density to speculatively evaluate many potential…