Related papers: Discrete approximation of a mixture distribution v…
This paper deals with a method for the approximation of a spectral density function among the solutions of a generalized moment problem a` la Byrnes/Georgiou/Lindquist. The approximation is pursued with respect to the Kullback-Leibler…
We consider the problem of approximating a general Gaussian location mixture by finite mixtures. The minimum order of finite mixtures that achieve a prescribed accuracy (measured by various $f$-divergences) is determined within constant…
A space discrete approximation to a highly nonlinear reaction-diffusion system endowed with a stochastic dynamical boundary condition is analyzed and the convergence of the discrete scheme to the solution to the corresponding continuum…
Finite precision approximations of discrete probability distributions are considered, applicable for distribution synthesis, e.g., probabilistic shaping. Two algorithms are presented that find the optimal $M$-type approximation $Q$ of a…
Uncertainty propagation in non-linear dynamical systems has become a key problem in various fields including control theory and machine learning. In this work we focus on discrete-time non-linear stochastic dynamical systems. We present a…
Density-based directed distances -- particularly known as divergences -- between probability distributions are widely used in statistics as well as in the adjacent research fields of information theory, artificial intelligence and machine…
We recently proposed a general algorithm for approximating nonstandard Bayesian posterior distributions by minimization of their Kullback-Leibler divergence with respect to a more convenient approximating distribution. In this note we offer…
We study density estimation in Kullback-Leibler divergence: given an i.i.d. sample from an unknown density $p^\star$, the goal is to construct an estimator $\widehat{p}$ such that $\mathrm{KL}(p^\star,\widehat{p})$ is small with high…
We study the Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence approximation theory of Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) by isolating an abstract mechanism behind several necessary-and-sufficient statements. The necessity direction is universal: if a density…
Gradients have been exploited in proposal distributions to accelerate the convergence of Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms on discrete distributions. However, these methods require a natural differentiable extension of the target discrete…
Bayesian nonparametric statistics is an area of considerable research interest. While recently there has been an extensive concentration in developing Bayesian nonparametric procedures for model checking, the use of the Dirichlet process,…
In this paper we study algorithms to find a Gaussian approximation to a target measure defined on a Hilbert space of functions; the target measure itself is defined via its density with respect to a reference Gaussian measure. We employ the…
We study Gaussian approximations to the distribution of a diffusion. The approximations are easy to compute: they are defined by two simple ordinary differential equations for the mean and the covariance. Time correlations can also be…
For a variant of the algorithm in [Pit19] (arXiv:1903.10816) to compute the approximate density or distribution function of a linear mixture of independent random variables known by a finite sample, it is presented a proof of the functional…
By a mixture density is meant a density of the form $\pi_{\mu}(\cdot)=\int\pi_{\theta}(\cdot)\times\mu(d\theta)$, where $(\pi_{\theta})_{\theta\in\Theta}$ is a family of probability densities and $\mu$ is a probability measure on $\Theta$.…
Many problems in navigation and tracking require increasingly accurate characterizations of the evolution of uncertainty in nonlinear systems. Nonlinear uncertainty propagation approaches based on Gaussian mixture density approximations…
We propose and analyze an algorithm to approximate distribution functions and densities of perpetuities. Our algorithm refines an earlier approach based on iterating discretized versions of the fixed point equation that defines the…
DIviding RECTangles (DIRECT) is an efficient and popular method in dealing with bound constrained optimization problems. However, DIRECT suffers from dimension curse, since its computational complexity soars when dimension increases.…
Discretization of continuous-time diffusion processes is a widely recognized method for sampling. However, it seems to be a considerable restriction when the potentials are often required to be smooth (gradient Lipschitz). This paper…
Particle-based methods include a variety of techniques, such as Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC), for approximating a probabilistic target distribution with a set of weighted particles. In this paper, we…