Related papers: Tempering by Subsampling
We present a simple method to obtain optimal posterior distributions and improve the quality of Bayesian inference with reduced human and computational effort. Bayes' Theorem is reformulated in the language of statistical mechanics, wherein…
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…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a well-established family of algorithms primarily used in Bayesian statistics to sample from a target distribution when direct sampling is challenging. Existing work on Bayesian decision trees uses MCMC.…
A key task in Bayesian machine learning is sampling from distributions that are only specified up to a partition function (i.e., constant of proportionality). One prevalent example of this is sampling posteriors in parametric distributions,…
Bayesian inference in deep neural networks is challenging due to the high-dimensional, strongly multi-modal parameter posterior density landscape. Markov chain Monte Carlo approaches asymptotically recover the true posterior but are…
Increased access to computing resources has led to the development of algorithms that can run efficiently on multi-core processing units or in distributed computing environments. In the context of Bayesian inference, many parallel computing…
Simulated tempering is a widely used strategy for sampling from multimodal distributions. In this paper, we consider simulated tempering combined with an arbitrary local Markov chain Monte Carlo sampler and present a new decomposition…
Finite mixtures are a cornerstone of Bayesian modelling, and it is well-known that sampling from the resulting posterior distribution can be a hard task. In particular, popular reversible Markov chain Monte Carlo schemes are often slow to…
An alternative to Monte Carlo techniques requiring large sampling times is presented here. Ideas from a genetic algorithm are used to select the best initial states from many independent, parallel Metropolis-Hastings iterations that are run…
The performance of Markov chain Monte Carlo samplers strongly depends on the properties of the target distribution such as its covariance structure, the location of its probability mass and its tail behavior. We explore the use of bijective…
Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) samplers are powerful tools for Bayesian inference but suffer from high computational costs due to their reliance on large particle ensembles for accurate estimates. We introduce persistent sampling (PS), an…
The posterior probability distribution for a set of model parameters encodes all that the data have to tell us in the context of a given model; it is the fundamental quantity for Bayesian parameter estimation. In order to infer the…
The era of huge data necessitates highly efficient machine learning algorithms. Many common machine learning algorithms, however, rely on computationally intensive subroutines that are prohibitively expensive on large datasets. Oftentimes,…
Subsampling is a computationally efficient and scalable method to draw inference in large data settings based on a subset of the data rather than needing to consider the whole dataset. When employing subsampling techniques, a crucial…
Due to the high dimensionality or multimodality that is common in modern astronomy, sampling Bayesian posteriors can be challenging. Several publicly available codes based on different sampling algorithms can solve these complex models, but…
We design and analyse variations of the classical Thompson sampling (TS) procedure for Bayesian optimisation (BO) in settings where function evaluations are expensive, but can be performed in parallel. Our theoretical analysis shows that a…
In this paper we develop a general framework for constructing and analysing coupled Markov chain Monte Carlo samplers, allowing for both (possibly degenerate) diffusion and piecewise deterministic Markov processes. For many performance…
We present a novel implementation of the parallel tempering Monte Carlo method in a multicanonical ensemble. Multicanonical weights are derived by a self-consistent iterative process using a Boltzmann inversion of global energy histograms.…
The main challenges that arise when adopting Gaussian Process priors in probabilistic modeling are how to carry out exact Bayesian inference and how to account for uncertainty on model parameters when making model-based predictions on…
Partial Bayesian neural networks (pBNNs) have been shown to perform competitively with fully Bayesian neural networks while only having a subset of the parameters be stochastic. Using sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) samplers as the inference…