Related papers: Variational consensus Monte Carlo
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…
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…
Quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) methods for estimating integrals are attractive since the resulting estimators typically converge at a faster rate than pseudo-random Monte Carlo. However, they can be difficult to set up on arbitrary posterior…
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…
We consider the problem of estimating expectations with respect to a target distribution with an unknown normalizing constant, and where even the unnormalized target needs to be approximated at finite resolution. Under such an assumption,…
In this paper, we address the challenge of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms within the approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) framework, which often get trapped in local optima due to their inherent local exploration mechanism. We…
We propose a very fast approximate Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling framework that is applicable to a large class of sparse Bayesian inference problems, where the computational cost per iteration in several models is of order…
We develop a novel Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method that exploits a hierarchy of models of increasing complexity to efficiently generate samples from an unnormalized target distribution. Broadly, the method rewrites the Multilevel…
This book aims to provide a graduate-level introduction to advanced topics in Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms, as applied broadly in the Bayesian computational context. Most, if not all of these topics (stochastic gradient MCMC,…
Many scientific and engineering problems require to perform Bayesian inferences in function spaces, in which the unknowns are of infinite dimension. In such problems, many standard Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms become arbitrary…
By formulating the inverse problem of partial differential equations (PDEs) as a statistical inference problem, the Bayesian approach provides a general framework for quantifying uncertainties. In the inverse problem of PDEs, parameters are…
We review recently proposed Bayesian approaches for clustering high-dimensional data. After identifying the main limitations of available approaches, we introduce an alternative framework based on vertical consensus inference (VCI) to…
Standard MCMC methods can scale poorly to big data settings due to the need to evaluate the likelihood at each iteration. There have been a number of approximate MCMC algorithms that use sub-sampling ideas to reduce this computational…
Monte Carlo (MC) sampling algorithms are an extremely widely-used technique to estimate expectations of functions f(x), especially in high dimensions. Control variates are a very powerful technique to reduce the error of such estimates, but…
Exact approximations of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are a general emerging class of sampling algorithms. One of the main ideas behind exact approximations consists of replacing intractable quantities required to run standard…
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…
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).…
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…
We propose a novel sampling framework for inference in probabilistic models: an active learning approach that converges more quickly (in wall-clock time) than Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) benchmarks. The central challenge in…
Variational inference has recently emerged as a popular alternative to the classical Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) in large-scale Bayesian inference. The core idea is to trade statistical accuracy for computational efficiency. In this…