Related papers: Metropolized Randomized Maximum Likelihood for sam…
We describe a general strategy for sampling configurations from a given distribution, NOT based on the standard Metropolis (Markov chain) strategy. It uses the fact that nontrivial problems in statistical physics are high dimensional and…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling of posterior distributions arising in Bayesian inverse problems is challenging when evaluations of the forward model are computationally expensive. Replacing the forward model with a low-cost,…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a Markov chain algorithm for sampling from a high-dimensional distribution with density $e^{-f(x)}$, given access to the gradient of $f$. A particular case of interest is that of a $d$-dimensional Gaussian…
This paper proposes a new randomized strategy for adaptive MCMC using Bayesian optimization. This approach applies to non-differentiable objective functions and trades off exploration and exploitation to reduce the number of potentially…
The pseudo-marginal algorithm is a popular variant of the Metropolis--Hastings scheme which allows us to sample asymptotically from a target probability density $\pi$, when we are only able to estimate an unnormalized version of $\pi$…
In recent times empirical likelihood has been widely applied under Bayesian framework. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are frequently employed to sample from the posterior distribution of the parameters of interest. However,…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques are now widely used for cosmological parameter estimation. Chains are generated to sample the posterior probability distribution obtained following the Bayesian approach. An important issue is how…
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…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods sample from unnormalized probability distributions and offer guarantees of exact sampling. However, in the continuous case, unfavorable geometry of the target distribution can greatly limit the…
The present paper focuses on the problem of sampling from a given target distribution $\pi$ defined on some general state space. To this end, we introduce a novel class of non-reversible Markov chains, each chain being defined on an…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods for sampling probability density functions (combined with abundant computational resources) have transformed the sciences, especially in performing probabilistic inferences, or fitting models to data.…
Probabilistic models are conceptually powerful tools for finding structure in data, but their practical effectiveness is often limited by our ability to perform inference in them. Exact inference is frequently intractable, so approximate…
Monte Carlo maximum likelihood (MCML) provides an elegant approach to find maximum likelihood estimators (MLEs) for latent variable models. However, MCML algorithms are computationally expensive when the latent variables are…
Efficient sampling from a high-dimensional Gaussian distribution is an old but high-stake issue. Vanilla Cholesky samplers imply a computational cost and memory requirements which can rapidly become prohibitive in high dimension. To tackle…
Enriching Brownian motion with regenerations from a fixed regeneration distribution $\mu$ at a particular regeneration rate $\kappa$ results in a Markov process that has a target distribution $\pi$ as its invariant distribution. For the…
We consider the problem of drawing samples from posterior distributions formed under a Dirichlet prior and a truncated multinomial likelihood, by which we mean a Multinomial likelihood function where we condition on one or more counts being…
Gaussian process (GP) models form a core part of probabilistic machine learning. Considerable research effort has been made into attacking three issues with GP models: how to compute efficiently when the number of data is large; how to…
In this paper a new estimator for the transition density $\pi$ of an homogeneous Markov chain is considered. We introduce an original contrast derived from regression framework and we use a model selection method to estimate $\pi$ under…
Deriving Bayesian inference for exponential random graph models (ERGMs) is a challenging "doubly intractable" problem as the normalizing constants of the likelihood and posterior density are both intractable. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)…
Multimodality of the likelihood in Gaussian mixtures is a well-known problem. The choice of the initial parameter vector for the numerical optimizer may affect whether the optimizer finds the global maximum, or gets trapped in a local…