Related papers: Sex as Gibbs Sampling: a probability model of evol…
This paper focuses on variational inference with intractable likelihood functions that can be unbiasedly estimated. A flexible variational approximation based on Gaussian mixtures is developed, by adopting the mixture population Monte Carlo…
Performing numerical integration when the integrand itself cannot be evaluated point-wise is a challenging task that arises in statistical analysis, notably in Bayesian inference for models with intractable likelihood functions. Markov…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms have become powerful tools for Bayesian inference. However, they do not scale well to large-data problems. Divide-and-conquer strategies, which split the data into batches and, for each batch, run…
In statistical analysis, Monte Carlo (MC) stands as a classical numerical integration method. When encountering challenging sample problem, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a commonly employed method. However, the MCMC estimator is biased…
We describe a general strategy for sampling configurations from a given (Gibbs-Boltzmann or other) distribution. It is {\it not} based on the Metropolis concept of establishing a Markov process whose stationary state is the wanted…
Learning to sample from complex unnormalized distributions is a fundamental challenge in computational physics and machine learning. While score-based and variational methods have achieved success in continuous domains, extending them to…
Phylogenetic analyses which include fossils or molecular sequences that are sampled through time require models that allow one sample to be a direct ancestor of another sample. As previously available phylogenetic inference tools assume…
A Monte Carlo algorithm is said to be adaptive if it automatically calibrates its current proposal distribution using past simulations. The choice of the parametric family that defines the set of proposal distributions is critical for good…
In recent years, the shortcomings of Bayesian posteriors as inferential devices have received increased attention. A popular strategy for fixing them has been to instead target a Gibbs measure based on losses that connect a parameter of…
The particle Gibbs (PG) sampler is a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm, which uses an interacting particle system to perform the Gibbs steps. Each Gibbs step consists of simulating a particle system conditioned on one particle path.…
This paper presents a Markov chain Monte Carlo method to generate approximate posterior samples in retrospective multiple changepoint problems where the number of changes is not known in advance. The method uses conjugate models whereby the…
In this paper we address the problem of Monte Carlo approximation of posterior probability distributions in stochastic kinetic models (SKMs). SKMs are multivariate Markov jump processes that model the interactions among species in…
Bayesian hierarchical modeling is a popular approach to capturing unobserved heterogeneity across individual units. However, standard estimation methods such as Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) can be impracticable for modeling outcomes from…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are simple and extremely powerful techniques to sample from almost arbitrary distributions. The flaw in practice is that it can take a large and/or unknown amount of time to converge to the…
The popularity of Adaptive MCMC has been fueled on the one hand by its success in applications, and on the other hand, by mathematically appealing and computationally straightforward optimisation criteria for the Metropolis algorithm…
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…
The class of $\alpha$-stable distributions enjoys multiple practical applications in signal processing, finance, biology and other areas because it allows to describe interesting and complex data patterns, such as asymmetry or heavy tails,…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) allows one to generate dependent replicates from a posterior distribution for effectively any Bayesian hierarchical model. However, MCMC can produce a significant computational burden. This motivates us to…
We describe a class of growth algorithms for finding low energy states of heteropolymers. These polymers form toy models for proteins, and the hope is that similar methods will ultimately be useful for finding native states of real proteins…
P-splines provide a flexible setting for modeling nonlinear model components based on a discretized penalty structure with a relatively simple computational backbone. Under a Bayesian inferential framework based on Markov chain Monte Carlo,…