Related papers: Efficient Exploration of Multi-Modal Posterior Dis…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are a workhorse of probabilistic modeling and inference, but are difficult to debug, and are prone to silent failure if implemented naively. We outline several strategies for testing the…

The use of the Bayesian tools in system identification and model updating paradigms has been increased in the last ten years. Usually, the Bayesian techniques can be implemented to incorporate the uncertainties associated with measurements…

Inferring directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) from data via Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is computationally challenging in moderate-to-high dimensional settings because their discrete sampling space grows super-exponentially with the number…

Monte Carlo (MC) integration is the de facto method for approximating the predictive distribution of Bayesian neural networks (BNNs). But, even with many MC samples, Gaussian-based BNNs could still yield bad predictive performance due to…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is an established approach for uncertainty quantification and propagation in scientific applications. A key challenge in applying MCMC to scientific domains is computation: the target density of interest is…

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…

We introduce a general Monte Carlo method based on Nested Sampling (NS), for sampling complex probability distributions and estimating the normalising constant. The method uses one or more particles, which explore a mixture of nested…

Delayed-acceptance Markov chain Monte Carlo (DA-MCMC) samples from a probability distribution via a two-stages version of the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm, by combining the target distribution with a "surrogate" (i.e. an approximate and…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods require a large number of samples to approximate a posterior distribution, which can be costly when the likelihood or prior is expensive to evaluate. The number of samples can be reduced if we can…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods become increasingly popular in applied mathematics as a tool for numerical integration with respect to complex and high-dimensional distributions. However, application of MCMC methods to heavy tailed…

Standard MCMC methods can scale poorly to big data settings due to the need to evaluate the likelihood at each iteration. There have been a number of approximate MCMC algorithms that use sub-sampling ideas to reduce this computational…

We propose a new Monte Carlo method for sampling from multimodal distributions. The idea of this technique is based on splitting the task into two: finding the modes of a target distribution $\pi$ and sampling, given the knowledge of the…

In the era of Big Data, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, which are currently essential for Bayesian estimation, face significant computational challenges owing to their sequential nature. To achieve a faster and more effective…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation methods are widely used to assess parametric uncertainties of hydrologic models conditioned on measurements of observable state variables. However, when the model is CPU-intensive and…

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…

The Markov Chain Monte Carlo method is the dominant paradigm for posterior computation in Bayesian analysis. It is common to control computation time by making approximations to the Markov transition kernel. Comparatively little attention…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are foundational algorithms for Bayesian inference and probabilistic modeling. However, most MCMC algorithms are inherently sequential and their time complexity scales linearly with the sequence…

We introduce a new algorithm for approximate inference that combines reparametrization, Markov chain Monte Carlo and variational methods. We construct a very flexible implicit variational distribution synthesized by an arbitrary Markov…

We introduce a powerful and flexible MCMC algorithm for stochastic simulation. The method builds on a pseudo-marginal method originally introduced in [Genetics 164 (2003) 1139--1160], showing how algorithms which are approximations to an…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are fundamental to Bayesian computation, but can be computationally intensive, especially in high-dimensional settings. Push-forward generative models, such as generative adversarial networks (GANs),…