Related papers: Testing MCMC code
I show how to construct Monte Carlo algorithms (programs), prove that they are correct and document them. Complicated algorithms are build using a handful of elementary methods. This construction process is transparently illustrated using…
We introduce a new Markov-Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach designed for efficient sampling of highly correlated and multimodal posteriors. Parallel tempering, though effective, is a costly technique for sampling such posteriors. Our…
Performing Bayesian inference via Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) can be exceedingly expensive when posterior evaluations invoke the evaluation of a computationally expensive model, such as a system of partial differential equations. In…
Statistical machine learning often uses probabilistic algorithms, such as Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), to solve a wide range of problems. Many accelerators are proposed using specialized hardware to address sampling inefficiency, the…
Generalized linear mixed models (GLMMs) are often used for analyzing correlated non-Gaussian data. The likelihood function in a GLMM is available only as a high dimensional integral, and thus closed-form inference and prediction are not…
Bayesian inference of Gibbs random fields (GRFs) is often referred to as a doubly intractable problem, since the likelihood function is intractable. The exploration of the posterior distribution of such models is typically carried out with…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) has emerged as a powerful Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method to sample from complex continuous distributions. However, a fundamental limitation of HMC is that it can not be applied to distributions with…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a widely used sampling method in modern artificial intelligence and probabilistic computing systems. It involves repetitive random number generations and thus often dominates the latency of probabilistic…
We present a cross-language C++/Python program for simulations of quantum mechanical systems with the use of Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) methods. We describe a system for which to apply QMC, the algorithms of variational Monte Carlo and…
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…
The problem of optimally scaling the proposal distribution in a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm is critical to the quality of the generated samples. Much work has gone into obtaining such results for various Metropolis-Hastings (MH)…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a powerful Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method for performing approximate inference in complex probabilistic models of continuous variables. In common with many MCMC methods, however, the standard HMC…
Deep architecture such as hierarchical semi-Markov models is an important class of models for nested sequential data. Current exact inference schemes either cost cubic time in sequence length, or exponential time in model depth. These costs…
Monte Carlo (MC) methods are widely used for Bayesian inference and optimization in statistics, signal processing and machine learning. A well-known class of MC methods are Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. In order to foster…
Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) is a methodology for sampling approximately from a sequence of probability distributions of increasing dimension and estimating their normalizing constants. We propose here an alternative methodology named…
Bayesian modelling and computational inference by Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a principled framework for large-scale uncertainty quantification, though is limited in practice by computational cost when implemented in the simplest…
This paper is on Bayesian inference for parametric statistical models that are defined by a stochastic simulator which specifies how data is generated. Exact sampling is then possible but evaluating the likelihood function is typically…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are a powerful but computationally expensive way of performing non-parametric Bayesian inference. MCMC proposals which utilise gradients, such as Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC), can better explore the…
The multiple Try Metropolis (MTM) algorithm is an advanced MCMC technique based on drawing and testing several candidates at each iteration of the algorithm. One of them is selected according to certain weights and then it is tested…
Probabilistic programming (PP) allows flexible specification of Bayesian statistical models in code. PyMC3 is a new, open-source PP framework with an intutive and readable, yet powerful, syntax that is close to the natural syntax…