English
Related papers

Related papers: Optimal approximating Markov chains for Bayesian i…

200 papers

We present a new approach to Bayesian inference that entirely avoids Markov chain simulation, by constructing a map that pushes forward the prior measure to the posterior measure. Existence and uniqueness of a suitable measure-preserving…

Computation · Statistics 2012-08-31 Tarek A. El Moselhy , Youssef M. Marzouk

Modern imaging methods rely strongly on Bayesian inference techniques to solve challenging imaging problems. Currently, the predominant Bayesian computation approach is convex optimisation, which scales very efficiently to high dimensional…

Computation · Statistics 2016-12-23 Alain Durmus , Eric Moulines , Marcelo Pereyra

Using Markov chain Monte Carlo to sample from posterior distributions was the key innovation which made Bayesian data analysis practical. Notoriously, however, MCMC is hard to tune, hard to diagnose, and hard to parallelize. This…

Computation · Statistics 2022-03-18 Cosma Rohilla Shalizi

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…

Computation · Statistics 2012-05-03 Murali Haran , Luke Tierney

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are often used in clustering since they guarantee asymptotically exact expectations in the infinite-time limit. In finite time, though, slow mixing often leads to poor performance. Modern computing…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-02-24 Tin D. Nguyen , Brian L. Trippe , Tamara Broderick

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-02-25 Jacob Steinhardt , Percy Liang

In Bayesian inference, predictive distributions are typically in the form of samples generated via Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) or related algorithms. In this paper, we conduct a systematic analysis of how to make and evaluate…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-06-25 Fabian Krüger , Sebastian Lerch , Thordis L. Thorarinsdottir , Tilmann Gneiting

We present a highly efficient proximal Markov chain Monte Carlo methodology to perform Bayesian computation in imaging problems. Similarly to previous proximal Monte Carlo approaches, the proposed method is derived from an approximation of…

Computation · Statistics 2020-03-20 Luis Vargas , Marcelo Pereyra , Konstantinos C. Zygalakis

A key quantity of interest in Bayesian inference are expectations of functions with respect to a posterior distribution. Markov Chain Monte Carlo is a fundamental tool to consistently compute these expectations via averaging samples drawn…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-02-10 Heiko Strathmann , Dino Sejdinovic , Mark Girolami

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…

Computation · Statistics 2020-09-21 Colin Fox , Tiangang Cui , Markus Neumayer

Advances in digital sensors, digital data storage and communications have resulted in systems being capable of accumulating large collections of data. In the light of dealing with the challenges that massive data present, this work proposes…

Computation · Statistics 2015-12-09 Allan De Freitas , François Septier , Lyudmila Mihaylova

Estimating the predictive uncertainty of a Bayesian learning model is critical in various decision-making problems, e.g., reinforcement learning, detecting adversarial attack, self-driving car. As the model posterior is almost always…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Yufei Cui , Wuguannan Yao , Qiao Li , Antoni B. Chan , Chun Jason Xue

Bayesian analysis often concerns an evaluation of models with different dimensionality as is necessary in, for example, model selection or mixture models. To facilitate this evaluation, transdimensional Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-08-13 Daniel W. Heck , Antony M. Overstall , Quentin F. Gronau , Eric-Jan Wagenmakers

In this paper, we consider the Markov-Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach for random sampling of combinatorial objects. The running time of such an algorithm depends on the total mixing time of the underlying Markov chain and is unknown in…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2016-09-15 Steffen Rechner , Annabell Berger

Performing numerical integration when the integrand itself cannot be evaluated point-wise is a challenging task that arises in statistical analysis, notably in Bayesian inference for models with intractable likelihood functions. Markov…

Computation · Statistics 2020-06-17 Lawrence Middleton , George Deligiannidis , Arnaud Doucet , Pierre E. Jacob

Bayesian inference allows us to define a posterior distribution over the weights of a generic neural network (NN). Exact posteriors are usually intractable, in which case approximations can be employed. One such approximation - variational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Andrew Millard , Joshua Murphy , Peter Green , Simon Maskell

Optimal designs minimize the number of experimental runs (samples) needed to accurately estimate model parameters, resulting in algorithms that, for instance, efficiently minimize parameter estimate variance. Governed by knowledge of past…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-02-03 Nicholas W. Barendregt , Emily G. Webb , Zachary P. Kilpatrick

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are generally regarded as the gold standard technique for Bayesian inference. They are theoretically well-understood and conceptually simple to apply in practice. The drawback of MCMC is that in…

Computation · Statistics 2019-07-17 Christopher Nemeth , Paul Fearnhead

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,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-07-18 Paul Fearnhead , Christopher Nemeth , Chris J. Oates , Chris Sherlock

Bayesian inference in deep neural networks is challenging due to the high-dimensional, strongly multi-modal parameter posterior density landscape. Markov chain Monte Carlo approaches asymptotically recover the true posterior but are…