Related papers: Importance sampling type estimators based on appro…
In this paper we address the problem of Monte Carlo approximation of posterior probability distributions in stochastic kinetic models (SKMs). SKMs are multivariate Markov jump processes that model the interactions among species in…
Bayesian inference for models that have an intractable partition function is known as a doubly intractable problem, where standard Monte Carlo methods are not applicable. The past decade has seen the development of auxiliary variable Monte…
This paper proposes a family of weighted batch means variance estimators, which are computationally efficient and can be conveniently applied in practice. The focus is on Markov chain Monte Carlo simulations and estimation of the asymptotic…
The naive importance sampling estimator, based on samples from a single importance density, can be numerically unstable. Instead, we consider generalized importance sampling estimators where samples from more than one probability…
Importance sampling is a popular method for efficient computation of various properties of a distribution such as probabilities, expectations, quantiles etc. The output of an importance sampling algorithm can be represented as a weighted…
We develop a computationally efficient framework for quasi-Bayesian inference based on linear moment conditions. The approach employs a delayed acceptance Markov chain Monte Carlo (DA-MCMC) algorithm that uses a surrogate target kernel and…
The inefficiency of using an unbiased estimator in a Monte Carlo procedure can be quantified using an inefficiency constant, equal to the product of the variance of the estimator and its mean computational cost. We develop methods for…
The Linear Ballistic Accumulator (Brown & Heathcote, 2008) model is used as a measurement tool to answer questions about applied psychology. The analyses based on this model depend upon the model selected and its estimated parameters.…
The naive importance sampling (IS) estimator generally does not work well in examples involving simultaneous inference on several targets, as the importance weights can take arbitrarily large values, making the estimator highly unstable. In…
This paper surveys some well-established approaches on the approximation of Bayes factors used in Bayesian model choice, mostly as covered in Chen et al. (2000). Our focus here is on methods that are based on importance sampling strategies…
The self-normalized importance sampling (SNIS) estimator is a Monte Carlo estimator widely used to approximate expectations in statistical signal processing and machine learning. The efficiency of SNIS depends on the choice of proposal, but…
Importance sampling (IS) is a powerful Monte Carlo methodology for the approximation of intractable integrals, very often involving a target probability density function. The performance of IS heavily depends on the appropriate selection of…
Doubly intractable models are encountered in a number of fields, e.g. social networks, ecology and epidemiology. Inference for such models requires the evaluation of a likelihood function, whose normalising factor depends on the model…
Importance Sampling (IS) is a widely used variance reduction technique for enhancing the efficiency of Monte Carlo methods, particularly in rare-event simulation and related applications. Despite its effectiveness, the performance of IS is…
Adaptive importance sampling is a class of techniques for finding good proposal distributions for importance sampling. Often the proposal distributions are standard probability distributions whose parameters are adapted based on the…
This paper investigates Monte Carlo (MC) methods to estimate probabilities of rare events associated with solutions to the $d$-dimensional McKean-Vlasov stochastic differential equation (MV-SDE). MV-SDEs are usually approximated using a…
Bayesian inference for doubly-intractable pairwise exponential graphical models typically involves variations of the exchange algorithm or approximate Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) samplers. However, existing methods for both classes of…
Importance sampling (IS) is a Monte Carlo technique that relies on weighted samples, simulated from a proposal distribution, to estimate intractable integrals. The quality of the estimators improves with the number of samples. However, for…
We consider estimating the marginal likelihood in settings with independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) data. We propose estimating the predictive distributions in a sequential factorization of the marginal likelihood in such…
Non-differentiable priors are standard in modern parsimonious Bayesian models. Lack of differentiability, however, precludes gradient-based Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) for posterior sampling. Recently proposed proximal MCMC approaches…