Related papers: Testing MCMC code

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a sampling-based method for estimating features of probability distributions. MCMC methods produce a serially correlated, yet representative, sample from the desired distribution. As such it can be…

We propose approaches for testing implementations of Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods as well as of general Monte Carlo methods. Based on statistical hypothesis tests, these approaches can be used in a unit testing framework to, for…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods such as Gibbs sampling are finding widespread use in applied statistics and machine learning. These often lead to difficult computational problems, which are increasingly being solved on parallel and…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms provide a very general recipe for estimating properties of complicated distributions. While their use has become commonplace and there is a large literature on MCMC theory and practice, MCMC users…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods for sampling probability density functions (combined with abundant computational resources) have transformed the sciences, especially in performing probabilistic inferences, or fitting models to data.…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are often used for approximate inference inside learning, but their slow mixing can be difficult to diagnose and the approximations can seriously degrade learning. To alleviate these issues, we…

The Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm is a widely recognised as an efficient method for sampling a specified posterior distribution. However, when the posterior is multi-modal, conventional MCMC algorithms either tend to become…

Many applications in signal processing require the estimation of some parameters of interest given a set of observed data. More specifically, Bayesian inference needs the computation of {\it a-posteriori} estimators which are often…

Performing reliable Bayesian inference on a big data scale is becoming a keystone in the modern era of machine learning. A workhorse class of methods to achieve this task are Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms and their design to…

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…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling is an important and commonly used tool for the analysis of hierarchical models. Nevertheless, practitioners generally have two options for MCMC: utilize existing software that generates a black-box…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods provide consistent of integrals as the number of iterations goes to infinity. MCMC estimators are generally biased after any fixed number of iterations. We propose to remove this bias by using…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have become a cornerstone of many modern scientific analyses by providing a straightforward approach to numerically estimate uncertainties in the parameters of a model using a sequence of random…

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…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are widely used in machine learning. One of the major problems with MCMC is the question of how to design chains that mix fast over the whole state space; in particular, how to select the parameters…

In parameter estimation problems one computes a posterior distribution over uncertain parameters defined jointly by a prior distribution, a model, and noisy data. Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is often used for the numerical solution of…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are a popular technique in Bayesian statistical modeling. They have long been used to obtain samples from posterior distributions, but recent research has focused on the scalability of these…

Variable selection is a key issue when analyzing high-dimensional data. The explosion of data with large sample sizes and dimensionality brings new challenges to this problem in both inference accuracy and computational complexity. To…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are generally regarded as the gold standard technique for Bayesian inference. They are theoretically well-understood and conceptually simple to apply in practice. The drawback of MCMC is that in…

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…