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Federated learning performed by a decentralized networks of agents is becoming increasingly important with the prevalence of embedded software on autonomous devices. Bayesian approaches to learning benefit from offering more information as…
Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) is a widely used inference method in Bayesian statistics to bypass the point-wise computation of the likelihood. In this paper we develop theoretical bounds for the distance between the statistics used…
We study efficient differentially private algorithms for estimating monotone statistics, i.e., statistics that are monotone under the addition of new observations. The starting point for our investigation is subsample-and-aggregate: a…
We propose a general alternating minimization algorithm for nonconvex optimization problems with separable structure and nonconvex coupling between blocks of variables. To fix our ideas, we apply the methodology to the problem of blind…
This paper examines Bayesian belief network inference using simulation as a method for computing the posterior probabilities of network variables. Specifically, it examines the use of a method described by Henrion, called logic sampling,…
The expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm is a powerful computational technique for finding the maximum likelihood estimates for parametric models when the data are not fully observed. The EM is best suited for situations where the…
Monte Carlo simulations are one of the major tools in statistical physics, complex system science, and other fields, and an increasing number of these simulations is run on distributed systems like clusters or grids. This raises the issue…
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…
In many contexts, there is interest in selecting the most important variables from a very large collection, commonly referred to as support recovery or variable, feature or subset selection. There is an enormous literature proposing a rich…
Stochastic variational Bayes algorithms have become very popular in the machine learning literature, particularly in the context of nonparametric Bayesian inference. These algorithms replace the true but intractable posterior distribution…
Restricting randomization in the design of experiments (e.g., using blocking/stratification, pair-wise matching, or rerandomization) can improve the treatment-control balance on important covariates and therefore improve the estimation of…
Bayesian inference allows us to define a posterior distribution over the weights of a generic neural network (NN). Exact posteriors are usually intractable, in which case approximations can be employed. One such approximation - variational…
Inference for the stochastic blockmodel is currently of burgeoning interest in the statistical community, as well as in various application domains as diverse as social networks, citation networks, brain connectivity networks…
Nonprobability (convenience) samples are increasingly sought to stabilize estimations for one or more population variables of interest that are performed using a randomized survey (reference) sample by increasing the effective sample size.…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a powerful algorithm to sample latent variables from Bayesian models. The advent of probabilistic programming languages (PPLs) frees users from writing inference algorithms and lets users focus on modeling.…
Discrete data are abundant and often arise as counts or rounded data. These data commonly exhibit complex distributional features such as zero-inflation, over-/under-dispersion, boundedness, and heaping, which render many parametric models…
There is a lack of simple and scalable algorithms for uncertainty quantification. Bayesian methods quantify uncertainty through posterior and predictive distributions, but it is difficult to rapidly estimate summaries of these…
We describe a number of strategies for minimizing and calculating accurately the statistical uncertainty in quantum Monte Carlo calculations. We investigate the impact of the sampling algorithm on the efficiency of the variational Monte…
Recently maximum pseudo-likelihood (MPL) inference method has been successfully applied to statistical physics models with intractable likelihoods. We use information theory to derive a relation between the pseudo-likelihood and likelihood…
Likelihood-free methods are useful for parameter estimation of complex models with intractable likelihood functions for which it is easy to simulate data. Such models are prevalent in many disciplines including genetics, biology, ecology…