Related papers: Efficient MCMC implementation of multi-state mark-…

We study general coordinate-wise MCMC schemes (such as Metropolis-within-Gibbs samplers), which are commonly used to fit Bayesian non-conjugate hierarchical models. We relate their convergence properties to the ones of the corresponding…

For modeling multivariate financial time series we propose a single factor copula model together with stochastic volatility margins. This model generalizes single factor models relying on the multivariate normal distribution and allows for…

Can we make Bayesian posterior MCMC sampling more efficient when faced with very large datasets? We argue that computing the likelihood for N datapoints in the Metropolis-Hastings (MH) test to reach a single binary decision is…

Traditional analyses of capture-recapture data are based on likelihood functions that explicitly integrate out all missing data. We use a complete data likelihood (CDL) to show how a wide range of capture-recapture models can be easily…

The ability to generate samples of the random effects from their conditional distributions is fundamental for inference in mixed effects models. Random walk Metropolis is widely used to conduct such sampling, but such a method can converge…

In large-scale genomic applications vast numbers of molecular features are scanned in order to find a small number of candidates which are linked to a particular disease or phenotype. This is a variable selection problem in the "large p,…

Gibbs sampling is a widely used Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method for numerically approximating integrals of interest in Bayesian statistics and other mathematical sciences. Many implementations of MCMC methods do not extend easily to…

Mechanistic modelling of animal movement is often formulated in discrete time despite problems with scale invariance, such as handling irregularly timed observations. A natural solution is to formulate in continuous time, yet uptake of this…

We introduce the Hamming Ball Sampler, a novel Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm, for efficient inference in statistical models involving high-dimensional discrete state spaces. The sampling scheme uses an auxiliary variable construction…

Over the last decade, hidden Markov models (HMMs) have become increasingly popular in statistical ecology, where they constitute natural tools for studying animal behavior based on complex sensor data. Corresponding analyses sometimes…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are a powerful tool for computation with complex probability distributions. However the performance of such methods is critically dependant on properly tuned parameters, most of which are difficult if…

Gibbs sampling is one of the most commonly used Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms due to its simplicity and efficiency. It cycles through the latent variables, sampling each one from its distribution conditional on the current…

Hidden Markov models (HMMs) are commonly used to model animal movement data and infer aspects of animal behavior. An HMM assumes that each data point from a time series of observations stems from one of $N$ possible states. The states are…

Global fits of physics models require efficient methods for exploring high-dimensional and/or multimodal posterior functions. We introduce a novel method for accelerating Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling by pairing a…

We demonstrate the use of a variational method to determine a quantitative lower bound on the rate of convergence of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms as a function of the target density and proposal density. The bound relies on…

Particle Marginal Metropolis-Hastings (PMMH) is a general approach to Bayesian inference when the likelihood is intractable, but can be estimated unbiasedly. Our article develops an efficient PMMH method that scales up better to higher…

Bayesian max-margin models have shown superiority in various practical applications, such as text categorization, collaborative prediction, social network link prediction and crowdsourcing, and they conjoin the flexibility of Bayesian…

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…

Motivated by recent findings that within-subject (WS) visit-to-visit variabilities of longitudinal biomarkers can be strong risk factors for health outcomes, this paper introduces and examines a new joint model of a longitudinal biomarker…

Hidden Markov models (HMMs) are widely applied in studies where a discrete-valued process of interest is observed indirectly. They have for example been used to model behaviour from human and animal tracking data, disease status from…