Related papers: Optimal scaling of the independence sampler: Theor…

Performing exact Bayesian inference for complex models is computationally intractable. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms can provide reliable approximations of the posterior distribution but are expensive for large datasets and…

It is common practice in Markov chain Monte Carlo to update the simulation one variable (or sub-block of variables) at a time, rather than conduct a single full-dimensional update. When it is possible to draw from each full-conditional…

We introduce a new Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampler called the Markov Interacting Importance Sampler (MIIS). The MIIS sampler uses conditional importance sampling (IS) approximations to jointly sample the current state of the Markov…

Component-wise MCMC algorithms, including Gibbs and conditional Metropolis-Hastings samplers, are commonly used for sampling from multivariate probability distributions. A long-standing question regarding Gibbs algorithms is whether a…

Deterministic compartmental models are predominantly used in the modeling of infectious diseases, though stochastic models are considered more realistic, yet are complicated to estimate due to missing data. In this paper we present a novel…

GNM: The MCMC Jagger. A rocking awesome sampler. This python package is an affine invariant Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampler based on the dynamic Gauss-Newton-Metropolis (GNM) algorithm. The GNM algorithm is specialized in sampling…

Gibbs sampling is a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method often used in Bayesian learning. MCMC methods can be difficult to deploy on parallel and distributed systems due to their inherently sequential nature. We study asynchronous Gibbs…

Mutual independence is a key concept in statistics that characterizes the structural relationships between variables. Existing methods to investigate mutual independence rely on the definition of two competing models, one being nested into…

Multivariate probit models (MPM) have the appealing feature of capturing some of the dependence structure between the components of multidimensional binary responses. The key for the dependence modelling is the covariance matrix of an…

We present an adaptive method for the automatic scaling of Random-Walk Metropolis-Hastings algorithms, which quickly and robustly identifies the scaling factor that yields a specified overall sampler acceptance probability. Our method…

A general methodology is introduced for the construction and effective application of control variates to estimation problems involving data from reversible MCMC samplers. We propose the use of a specific class of functions as control…

The Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithm is one of the most widely used Markov Chain Monte Carlo schemes for generating samples from Bayesian posterior distributions. The algorithm is asymptotically exact, flexible and easy to implement.…

Optimal scaling has been well studied for Metropolis-Hastings (M-H) algorithms in continuous spaces, but a similar understanding has been lacking in discrete spaces. Recently, a family of locally balanced proposals (LBP) for discrete spaces…

Sampling from matrix generalized inverse Gaussian (MGIG) distributions is required in Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms for a variety of statistical models. However, an efficient sampling scheme for the MGIG distributions has not…

We consider various versions of adaptive Gibbs and Metropolis within-Gibbs samplers, which update their selection probabilities (and perhaps also their proposal distributions) on the fly during a run, by learning as they go in an attempt to…

Importance Sampling methods are broadly used to approximate posterior distributions or some of their moments. In its standard approach, samples are drawn from a single proposal distribution and weighted properly. However, since the…

Identifying dependency in multivariate data is a common inference task that arises in numerous applications. However, existing nonparametric independence tests typically require computation that scales at least quadratically with the sample…

Bayesian feature allocation models are a popular tool for modelling data with a combinatorial latent structure. Exact inference in these models is generally intractable and so practitioners typically apply Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are ubiquitous tools for simulation-based inference in many fields but designing and identifying good MCMC samplers is still an open question. This paper introduces a novel MCMC algorithm, namely,…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are routinely used to draw samples from distributions with intractable normalization constants. However, standard MCMC algorithms do not apply to doubly-intractable distributions in which there are…