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Bayesian inference under a set of priors, called robust Bayesian analysis, allows for estimation of parameters within a model and quantification of epistemic uncertainty in quantities of interest by bounded (or imprecise) probability.…

Adaptive Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms, which automatically tune their parameters based on past samples, have proved extremely useful in practice. The self-tuning mechanism makes them `non-Markovian', which means that their…

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…

It is widely known that the performance of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) can degrade quickly when targeting computationally expensive posterior distributions, such as when the sample size is large. This has motivated the search for MCMC…

Controlled branching processes are stochastic growth population models in which the number of individuals with reproductive capacity in each generation is controlled by a random control function. The purpose of this work is to examine the…

The main challenges that arise when adopting Gaussian Process priors in probabilistic modeling are how to carry out exact Bayesian inference and how to account for uncertainty on model parameters when making model-based predictions on…

Sampling from complicated probability distributions is a hard computational problem arising in many fields, including statistical physics, optimization, and machine learning. Quantum computers have recently been used to sample from…

Approximate Bayesian computation has emerged as a standard computational tool when dealing with the increasingly common scenario of completely intractable likelihood functions in Bayesian inference. We show that many common Markov chain…

Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) has gained popularity over the past few years for the analysis of complex models arising in population genetic, epidemiology and system biology. Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) approaches have become work…

Bayesian models have become very popular over the last years in several fields such as signal processing, statistics, and machine learning. Bayesian inference requires the approximation of complicated integrals involving posterior…

We propose a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm based on Gibbs sampling with parallel tempering to solve nonlinear optimal control problems. The algorithm is applicable to nonlinear systems with dynamics that can be approximately…

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…

Integration over non-negative integrands is a central problem in machine learning (e.g. for model averaging, (hyper-)parameter marginalisation, and computing posterior predictive distributions). Bayesian Quadrature is a probabilistic…

We introduce a novel combination of Bayesian Models (BMs) and Neural Networks (NNs) for making predictions with a minimum expected risk. Our approach combines the best of both worlds, the data efficiency and interpretability of a BM with…

In this paper we address the problem of Monte Carlo approximation of posterior probability distributions in stochastic kinetic models (SKMs). SKMs are multivariate Markov jump processes that model the interactions among species in…

We introduce and characterise the performance of the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) inference method Prune Sampling for discrete and deterministic Bayesian networks (BNs). We developed a procedure to obtain the performance of a MCMC…

Stochastic approximation Monte Carlo (SAMC) has recently been proposed by Liang, Liu and Carroll [J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 102 (2007) 305--320] as a general simulation and optimization algorithm. In this paper, we propose to improve its…

A popular method for likelihood-free inference is approximate Bayesian computation sequential Monte Carlo (ABC-SMC) algorithms. These approximate the posterior using a population of particles, which are updated using Markov kernels. Several…

We present an efficient algorithm for the inference of stochastic block models in large networks. The algorithm can be used as an optimized Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method, with a fast mixing time and a much reduced susceptibility to…

Bayesian low-rank matrix factorization techniques have become an essential tool for relational data analysis and matrix completion. A standard approach is to assign zero-mean Gaussian priors on the columns or rows of factor matrices to…