Related papers: Unbiased Monte Carlo: posterior estimation for int…

We consider the problem of estimating expectations with respect to a target distribution with an unknown normalizing constant, and where even the unnormalized target needs to be approximated at finite resolution. Under such an assumption,…

Consider a process, stochastic or deterministic, obtained by using a numerical integration scheme, or from Monte-Carlo methods involving an approximation to an integral, or a Newton-Raphson iteration to approximate the root of an equation.…

Estimating the predictive uncertainty of a Bayesian learning model is critical in various decision-making problems, e.g., reinforcement learning, detecting adversarial attack, self-driving car. As the model posterior is almost always…

We study stochastic gradient descent for solving conditional stochastic optimization problems, in which an objective to be minimized is given by a parametric nested expectation with an outer expectation taken with respect to one random…

Bayesian learning in undirected graphical models|computing posterior distributions over parameters and predictive quantities is exceptionally difficult. We conjecture that for general undirected models, there are no tractable MCMC (Markov…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) provides a feasible method for inferring Hidden Markov models, however, it is often computationally prohibitive, especially constrained by the curse of dimensionality, as the Monte Carlo sampler traverses…

Variational Bayes (VB) is a popular tool for Bayesian inference in statistical modeling. Recently, some VB algorithms are proposed to handle intractable likelihoods with applications such as approximate Bayesian computation. In this paper,…

Given a smooth function $f$, we develop a general approach to turn Monte Carlo samples with expectation $m$ into an unbiased estimate of $f(m)$. Specifically, we develop estimators that are based on randomly truncating the Taylor series…

In many hierarchical inverse problems, not only do we want to estimate high- or infinite-dimensional model parameters in the parameter-to-observable maps, but we also have to estimate hyperparameters that represent critical assumptions in…

We consider the efficient use of an approximation within Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), with subsequent importance sampling (IS) correction of the Markov chain inexact output, leading to asymptotically exact inference. We detail…

Monte Carlo methods represent the "de facto" standard for approximating complicated integrals involving multidimensional target distributions. In order to generate random realizations from the target distribution, Monte Carlo techniques use…

Computing partition functions, the normalizing constants of probability distributions, is often hard. Variants of importance sampling give unbiased estimates of a normalizer Z, however, unbiased estimates of the reciprocal 1/Z are harder to…

We propose a methodology to parallelize Hamiltonian Monte Carlo estimators. Our approach constructs a pair of Hamiltonian Monte Carlo chains that are coupled in such a way that they meet exactly after some random number of iterations. These…

Accept-reject based Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are the workhorse algorithm for Bayesian inference. These algorithms, like Metropolis-Hastings, require choosing a proposal distribution which is typically informed by the desired…

Discrete data are abundant and often arise as counts or rounded data. These data commonly exhibit complex distributional features such as zero-inflation, over-/under-dispersion, boundedness, and heaping, which render many parametric models…

Bayesian inference for models that have an intractable partition function is known as a doubly intractable problem, where standard Monte Carlo methods are not applicable. The past decade has seen the development of auxiliary variable Monte…

Approximate inference in probabilistic graphical models (PGMs) can be grouped into deterministic methods and Monte-Carlo-based methods. The former can often provide accurate and rapid inferences, but are typically associated with biases…

Monte Carlo integration is a commonly used technique to compute intractable integrals and is typically thought to perform poorly for very high-dimensional integrals. To show that this is not always the case, we examine Monte Carlo…

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…

Importance sampling is a Monte Carlo method which designs estimators of expectations under a target distribution using weighted samples from a proposal distribution. When the target distribution is complex, such as multimodal distributions…