Related papers: Efficient Sequential Monte-Carlo Samplers for Baye…
Recent advances in stochastic gradient variational inference have made it possible to perform variational Bayesian inference with posterior approximations containing auxiliary random variables. This enables us to explore a new synthesis of…
In performing a Bayesian analysis, two difficult problems often emerge. First, in estimating the parameters of some model for the data, the resulting posterior distribution may be multi-modal or exhibit pronounced (curving) degeneracies.…
Sequential Monte Carlo techniques are useful for state estimation in non-linear, non-Gaussian dynamic models. These methods allow us to approximate the joint posterior distribution using sequential importance sampling. In this framework,…
In this paper we introduce and formalize Substochastic Monte Carlo (SSMC) algorithms. These algorithms, originally intended to be a better classical foil to quantum annealing than simulated annealing, prove to be worthy optimization…
Bayesian hierarchical modeling is a popular approach to capturing unobserved heterogeneity across individual units. However, standard estimation methods such as Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) can be impracticable for modeling outcomes from…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are widely used to sample from complicated distributions, especially to sample from the posterior distribution in Bayesian inference. However, MCMC is not directly applicable when facing the doubly…
Leaving posterior sensitivity concerns aside, non-identifiability of the parameters does not raise a difficulty for Bayesian inference as far as the posterior is proper, but multi-modality or flat regions of the posterior induced by the…
Bayesian inference in the presence of an intractable likelihood function is computationally challenging. When following a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach to approximate the posterior distribution in this context, one typically…
Hybrid Monte-Carlo (HMC) sampling smoother is a fully non-Gaussian four-dimensional data assimilation algorithm that works by directly sampling the posterior distribution formulated in the Bayesian framework. The smoother in its original…
Many machine learning problems involve Monte Carlo gradient estimators. As a prominent example, we focus on Monte Carlo variational inference (MCVI) in this paper. The performance of MCVI crucially depends on the variance of its stochastic…
In this article, an overview of Bayesian methods for sequential simulation from posterior distributions of nonlinear and non-Gaussian dynamic systems is presented. The focus is mainly laid on sequential Monte Carlo methods, which are based…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have not been broadly adopted in Bayesian neural networks (BNNs). This paper initially reviews the main challenges in sampling from the parameter posterior of a neural network via MCMC. Such…
Multifidelity approximate Bayesian computation (MF-ABC) is a likelihood-free technique for parameter inference that exploits model approximations to significantly increase the speed of ABC algorithms (Prescott and Baker, 2020). Previous…
Fitting stochastic kinetic models represented by Markov jump processes within the Bayesian paradigm is complicated by the intractability of the observed data likelihood. There has therefore been considerable attention given to the design of…
Importance sampling (IS) is commonly used for cross validation (CV) in Bayesian models, because it only involves reweighting existing posterior draws without needing to re-estimate the model by re-running Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC).…
We present a sequential Monte Carlo sampler variant of the partial rejection control algorithm, and show that this variant can be considered as a sequential Monte Carlo sampler with a modified mutation kernel. We prove that the new sampler…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a state of the art method for sampling from distributions with differentiable densities, but can converge slowly when applied to challenging multimodal problems. Running HMC with a time varying Hamiltonian,…
The Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) sampling algorithm exploits Hamiltonian dynamics to construct efficient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), which has become increasingly popular in machine learning and statistics. Since HMC uses the gradient…
Sequential Monte Carlo Samplers are a class of stochastic algorithms for Monte Carlo integral estimation w.r.t. probability distributions, which combine elements of Markov chain Monte Carlo methods and importance sampling/resampling…
Nested sampling is a powerful approach to Bayesian inference ultimately limited by the computationally demanding task of sampling from a heavily constrained probability distribution. An effective algorithm in its own right, Hamiltonian…