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This chapter will appear in the forthcoming Handbook of Approximate Bayesian Computation (2018). Indirect inference (II) is a classical likelihood-free approach that pre-dates the main developments of ABC and relies on simulation from a…
With larger data at their disposal, scientists are emboldened to tackle complex questions that require sophisticated statistical models. It is not unusual for the latter to have likelihood functions that elude analytical formulations. Even…
Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) can be used for model fitting when the likelihood function is intractable but simulating from the model is feasible. However, even a single evaluation of a complex model may take several hours,…
This paper introduces a hierarchical framework to incorporate Hellinger distance methods into Bayesian analysis. We propose to modify a prior over non-parametric densities with the exponential of twice the Hellinger distance between a…
Over the past decade, the field of forensic science has received recommendations from the National Research Council of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the U.S. President's…
In modern data analysis, nonparametric measures of discrepancies between random variables are particularly important. The subject is well-studied in the frequentist literature, while the development in the Bayesian setting is limited where…
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…
The Bayesian approach to inference stands out for naturally allowing borrowing information across heterogeneous populations, with different samples possibly sharing the same distribution. A popular Bayesian nonparametric model for…
We derive the optimal proposal density for Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) using Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) (or Population Monte Carlo, PMC). The criterion for optimality is that the SMC/PMC-ABC sampler maximise the effective…
Complex simulators have become a ubiquitous tool in many scientific disciplines, providing high-fidelity, implicit probabilistic models of natural and social phenomena. Unfortunately, they typically lack the tractability required for…
In the following article we consider approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) inference. We introduce a method for numerically approximating ABC posteriors using the multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC). A sequential Monte Carlo version of the…
A Bayesian nonparametric method for unimodal densities on the real line is provided by considering a class of species sampling mixture models containing random densities that are unimodal and not necessarily symmetric. This class of…
This invited feature article introduces and provides an extensive simulation study of a new Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) framework for estimating the posterior distribution and the maximum likelihood estimate (MLE) of the…
We research relations between optimal transport theory (OTT) and approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) possibly connected to relevant metrics defined on probability measures. Those of ABC are computational methods based on Bayesian…
The posterior probability distribution for a set of model parameters encodes all that the data have to tell us in the context of a given model; it is the fundamental quantity for Bayesian parameter estimation. In order to infer the…
Kernel methods are one of the mainstays of machine learning, but the problem of kernel learning remains challenging, with only a few heuristics and very little theory. This is of particular importance in methods based on estimation of…
Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) has advanced in two decades from a seminal idea to a practically applicable inference tool for simulator-based statistical models, which are becoming increasingly popular in many research domains. The…
Likelihood-free methods, such as approximate Bayesian computation, are powerful tools for practical inference problems with intractable likelihood functions. Markov chain Monte Carlo and sequential Monte Carlo variants of approximate…
Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC), also known as likelihood-free methods, have become a favourite tool for the analysis of complex stochastic models, primarily in population genetics but also in financial analyses. We advocated in…
This paper introduces a simple, general framework for likelihood-free Bayesian reinforcement learning, through Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC). The main advantage is that we only require a prior distribution on a class of simulators…