Related papers: Maximum Likelihood Learning With Arbitrary Treewid…

We study the $L_1$-regularized maximum likelihood estimator/estimation (MLE) problem for discrete Markov random fields (MRFs), where efficient and scalable learning requires both sparse regularization and approximate inference. To address…

Linear structural equation models postulate noisy linear relationships between variables of interest. Each model corresponds to a path diagram, which is a mixed graph with directed edges that encode the domains of the linear functions and…

This study investigates the limitations of applying Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods to arbitrary objective functions, focusing on a two-block MCMC framework which alternates between Metropolis-Hastings and Gibbs sampling. While such…

This study investigates the effects of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling in unsupervised Maximum Likelihood (ML) learning. Our attention is restricted to the family of unnormalized probability densities for which the negative log…

We give a new rapid mixing result for a natural random walk on the independent sets of a graph $G$. We show that when $G$ has bounded treewidth, this random walk -- known as the Glauber dynamics for the hardcore model -- mixes rapidly for…

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…

Query evaluation on probabilistic databases is generally intractable (#P-hard). Existing dichotomy results have identified which queries are tractable (or safe), and connected them to tractable lineages. In our previous work, using…

Stochastic optimization in learning and inference often relies on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) to approximate gradients when exact computation is intractable. However, finite-time MCMC estimators are biased, and reducing this bias…

Bayesian inference for doubly-intractable pairwise exponential graphical models typically involves variations of the exchange algorithm or approximate Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) samplers. However, existing methods for both classes of…

We present improved learning-augmented algorithms for finding an approximate minimum spanning tree (MST) for points in an arbitrary metric space. Our work follows a recent framework called metric forest completion (MFC), where the learned…

Inferring directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) from data via Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is computationally challenging in moderate-to-high dimensional settings because their discrete sampling space grows super-exponentially with the number…

Many problems in the physical sciences, machine learning, and statistical inference necessitate sampling from a high-dimensional, multi-modal probability distribution. Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms, the ubiquitous tool for this…

We consider the parameter estimation problem of a probabilistic generative model prescribed using a natural exponential family of distributions. For this problem, the typical maximum likelihood estimator usually overfits under limited…

Markov chains are one of the well-known tools for modeling and analyzing stochastic systems. At the same time, they are used for constructing random walks that can achieve a given stationary distribution. This paper is concerned with…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling of densities restricted to linearly constrained domains is an important task arising in Bayesian treatment of inverse problems in the natural sciences. While efficient algorithms for uniform polytope…

We show that the class of strongly connected graphical models with treewidth at most k can be properly efficiently PAC-learnt with respect to the Kullback-Leibler Divergence. Previous approaches to this problem, such as those of Chow ([1]),…

This paper studies a Markov chain for phylogenetic reconstruction which uses a popular transition between tree topologies known as subtree pruning-and-regrafting (SPR). We analyze the Markov chain in the simpler setting that the generating…

Structured output prediction is an important machine learning problem both in theory and practice, and the max-margin Markov network (\mcn) is an effective approach. All state-of-the-art algorithms for optimizing \mcn\ objectives take at…

Several approaches to graphically representing context-specific relations among jointly distributed categorical variables have been proposed, along with structure learning algorithms. While existing optimization-based methods have limited…

Bayesian inference for Markov processes has become increasingly relevant in recent years. Problems of this type often have intractable likelihoods and prior knowledge about model rate parameters is often poor. Markov Chain Monte Carlo…