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We introduce a powerful and flexible MCMC algorithm for stochastic simulation. The method builds on a pseudo-marginal method originally introduced in [Genetics 164 (2003) 1139--1160], showing how algorithms which are approximations to an…

We propose a multilevel Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method for the Bayesian inference of random field parameters in PDEs using high-resolution data. Compared to existing multilevel MCMC methods, we additionally consider level-dependent…

Numerous capability and safety techniques of Large Language Models (LLMs), including RLHF, automated red-teaming, prompt engineering, and infilling, can be cast as sampling from an unnormalized target distribution defined by a given reward…

The identification of parameters in mathematical models using noisy observations is a common task in uncertainty quantification. We employ the framework of Bayesian inversion: we combine monitoring and observational data with prior…

We introduce a new class of Monte Carlo based approximations of expectations of random variables such that their laws are only available via certain discretizations. Sampling from the discretized versions of these laws can typically…

In this article we consider the approximation of expectations w.r.t. probability distributions associated to the solution of partial differential equations (PDEs); this scenario appears routinely in Bayesian inverse problems. In practice,…

We investigate the efficiency of a marginal likelihood estimator where the product of the marginal posterior distributions is used as an importance-sampling function. The approach is generally applicable to multi-block parameter vector…

The multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) method is highly efficient for estimating expectations of a functional of a solution to a stochastic differential equation (SDE). However, MLMC estimators may be unstable and have a poor (noncanonical)…

Models of stochastic processes are widely used in almost all fields of science. Theory validation, parameter estimation, and prediction all require model calibration and statistical inference using data. However, data are almost always…

We consider the problem of estimating rare event probabilities, focusing on systems whose evolution is governed by differential equations with uncertain input parameters. If the system dynamics is expensive to compute, standard sampling…

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…

This paper introduces a Bayesian framework that combines Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling, dimensionality reduction, and neural density estimation to efficiently handle inverse problems that (i) must be solved multiple times, and…

The fully marginalized likelihood, or Bayesian evidence, is of great importance in probabilistic data analysis, because it is involved in calculating the posterior probability of a model or re-weighting a mixture of models conditioned on…

We present a new Monte Carlo methodology for the accurate estimation of the distribution of the sum of dependent log-normal random variables. The methodology delivers statistically unbiased estimators for three distributional quantities of…

We describe an embarrassingly parallel, anytime Monte Carlo method for likelihood-free models. The algorithm starts with the view that the stochasticity of the pseudo-samples generated by the simulator can be controlled externally by a…

Metrics of model goodness-of-fit, model comparison, and model parameter estimation are the main categories of statistical problems in science. Bayesian and frequentist methods that address these questions often rely on a likelihood…

This article presents a Bayesian inferential method where the likelihood for a model is unknown but where data can easily be simulated from the model. We discretize simulated (continuous) data to estimate the implicit likelihood in a…

Computing risk measures of a financial portfolio comprising thousands of derivatives is a challenging problem because (a) it involves a nested expectation requiring multiple evaluations of the loss of the financial portfolio for different…

The trace of a matrix function f(A), most notably of the matrix inverse, can be estimated stochastically using samples< x,f(A)x> if the components of the random vectors x obey an appropriate probability distribution. However such a…

We propose a novel Continuation Multi Level Monte Carlo (CMLMC) algorithm for weak approximation of stochastic models. The CMLMC algorithm solves the given approximation problem for a sequence of decreasing tolerances, ending when the…