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Bayesian analysis often concerns an evaluation of models with different dimensionality as is necessary in, for example, model selection or mixture models. To facilitate this evaluation, transdimensional Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)…
The Metropolis-Hastings algorithm is a fundamental Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method for sampling and inference. With the advent of Big Data, distributed and parallel variants of MCMC methods are attracting increased attention. In this…
Bayesian computational algorithms tend to scale poorly as data size increases. This has motivated divide-and-conquer-based approaches for scalable inference. These divide the data into subsets, perform inference for each subset in parallel,…
Bayesian methods are critical for quantifying the behaviors of systems. They capture our uncertainty about a system's behavior using probability distributions and update this understanding as new information becomes available. Probabilistic…
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…
Bernoulli factory MCMC algorithms implement accept-reject Markov chains without explicit computation of acceptance probabilities, and are used to target posterior distributions associated with intractable likelihood models. Intractable…
We consider the efficient use of an approximation within Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), with subsequent importance sampling (IS) correction of the Markov chain inexact output, leading to asymptotically exact inference. We detail…
In performing a Bayesian analysis, two difficult problems often emerge. First, in estimating the parameters of some model for the data, the resulting posterior distribution may be multi-modal or exhibit pronounced (curving) degeneracies.…
Monte Carlo methods are essential tools for Bayesian inference. Gibbs sampling is a well-known Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm, extensively used in signal processing, machine learning, and statistics, employed to draw samples from…
Monte Carlo (MC) methods are widely used for Bayesian inference and optimization in statistics, signal processing and machine learning. A well-known class of MC methods are Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. In order to foster…
To conduct Bayesian inference with large data sets, it is often convenient or necessary to distribute the data across multiple machines. We consider a likelihood function expressed as a product of terms, each associated with a subset of the…
Many inference problems involve inferring the number $N$ of components in some region, along with their properties $\{\mathbf{x}_i\}_{i=1}^N$, from a dataset $\mathcal{D}$. A common statistical example is finite mixture modelling. In the…
Sequential Monte Carlo is a family of algorithms for sampling from a sequence of distributions. Some of these algorithms, such as particle filters, are widely used in the physics and signal processing researches. More recent developments…
Leaving posterior sensitivity concerns aside, non-identifiability of the parameters does not raise a difficulty for Bayesian inference as far as the posterior is proper, but multi-modality or flat regions of the posterior induced by the…
Likelihood-free methods, such as approximate Bayesian computation, are powerful tools for practical inference problems with intractable likelihood functions. Markov chain Monte Carlo and sequential Monte Carlo variants of approximate…
Bayesian Decision Trees (DTs) are generally considered a more advanced and accurate model than a regular Decision Tree (DT) because they can handle complex and uncertain data. Existing work on Bayesian DTs uses Markov Chain Monte Carlo…
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…
Communication costs, resulting from synchronization requirements during learning, can greatly slow down many parallel machine learning algorithms. In this paper, we present a parallel Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm in which…
Poisson log-linear models are ubiquitous in many applications, and one of the most popular approaches for parametric count regression. In the Bayesian context, however, there are no sufficient specific computational tools for efficient…
Bayesian regression remains a simple but effective tool based on Bayesian inference techniques. For large-scale applications, with complicated posterior distributions, Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods are applied. To improve the well-known…