Related papers: Prior specification of neighbourhood and interacti…
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…
In this paper, we introduce a new concept for constructing prior distributions. We exploit the natural nested structure inherent to many model components, which defines the model component to be a flexible extension of a base model. Proper…
The application of the Markov chain to modeling agricultural succession is well known. In most cases, the main problem is the inference of the model, i.e. the estimation of the transition matrix. In this work we present methods to estimate…
Proximal Markov Chain Monte Carlo is a novel construct that lies at the intersection of Bayesian computation and convex optimization, which helped popularize the use of nondifferentiable priors in Bayesian statistics. Existing formulations…
Fitted probabilities from widely used Bayesian multinomial probit models can depend strongly on the choice of a base category, which is used to uniquely identify the parameters of the model. This paper proposes a novel identification…
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…
Identifying important features linked to a response variable is a fundamental task in various scientific domains. This article explores statistical inference for simulated Markov random fields in high-dimensional settings. We introduce a…
For spatial and network data, we consider models formed from a Markov random field (MRF) structure and the specification of a conditional distribution for each observation. Fast simulation from such MRF models is often an important…
Discrete Markov random fields form a natural class of models to represent images and spatial data sets. The use of such models is, however, hampered by a computationally intractable normalising constant. This makes parameter estimation and…
The ways in which an agent's actions affect the world can often be modeled compactly using a set of relational probabilistic planning rules. This paper addresses the problem of learning such rule sets for multiple related tasks. We take a…
In sampling tasks, it is common for target distributions to be known up to a normalizing constant. However, in many situations, even evaluating the unnormalized distribution can be costly or infeasible. This issue arises in scenarios such…
Learning the structure of Markov random fields (MRFs) plays an important role in multivariate analysis. The importance has been increasing with the recent rise of statistical relational models since the MRF serves as a building block of…
Bayesian variable selection requires sampling from a posterior distribution that combines discrete model indicators with continuously varying parameters, a challenge often addressed through reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo (RJMCMC).…
We investigate the use of normalizing flow (NF) models as flexible priors in Bayesian inference via Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling for iterative Bayesian calibration. Trained on posteriors from previous analyses, these models can…
We address the problem of approximating the posterior probability distribution of the fixed parameters of a state-space dynamical system using a sequential Monte Carlo method. The proposed approach relies on a nested structure that employs…
We propose a probabilistic framework to directly insert prior knowledge in reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms by defining the behaviour policy as a Bayesian posterior distribution. Such a posterior combines task specific information…
In recent years a number of methods have been developed for automatically learning the (sparse) connectivity structure of Markov Random Fields. These methods are mostly based on L1-regularized optimization which has a number of…
In this paper, we study a biased version of the nearest-neighbor transposition Markov chain on the set of permutations where neighboring elements $i$ and $j$ are placed in order $(i,j)$ with probability $p_{i,j}$. Our goal is to identify…
In recent years a number of methods have been developed for automatically learning the (sparse) connectivity structure of Markov Random Fields. These methods are mostly based on L1-regularized optimization which has a number of…
Markov chains are one of the well-known tools for modeling and analyzing stochastic systems. At the same time, they are used for constructing random walks that can achieve a given stationary distribution. This paper is concerned with…