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Many Bayesian inference problems involve high dimensional models for which only a subset of the model variables are of actual interest. All other variables are just nuisance parameters that one would ideally like to integrate out…

Constructing unbiased estimators from Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) outputs is a difficult problem that has recently received a lot of attention in the statistics and machine learning communities. However, the current unbiased MCMC…

For complex latent variable models, the likelihood function is not available in closed form. In this context, a popular method to perform parameter estimation is Importance Weighted Variational Inference. It essentially maximizes the…

Simulated annealing - moving from a tractable distribution to a distribution of interest via a sequence of intermediate distributions - has traditionally been used as an inexact method of handling isolated modes in Markov chain samplers.…

We consider posterior sampling in the very common Bayesian hierarchical model in which observed data depends on high-dimensional latent variables that, in turn, depend on relatively few hyperparameters. When the full conditional over the…

Switching state-space models (SSSM) are a very popular class of time series models that have found many applications in statistics, econometrics and advanced signal processing. Bayesian inference for these models typically relies on Markov…

Importance sampling is a widely used technique to reduce the variance of a Monte Carlo estimator by an appropriate change of measure. In this work, we study importance sam- pling in the framework of diffusion process and consider the change…

Given a sequence of observations from a discrete-time, finite-state hidden Markov model, we would like to estimate the sampling distribution of a statistic. The bootstrap method is employed to approximate the confidence regions of a…

Stochastic gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (SGMCMC) is considered the gold standard for Bayesian inference in large-scale models, such as Bayesian neural networks. Since practitioners face speed versus accuracy tradeoffs in these models,…

Importance sampling (IS) and numerical integration methods are usually employed for approximating moments of complicated target distributions. In its basic procedure, the IS methodology randomly draws samples from a proposal distribution…

Gaussian latent variable models are a key class of Bayesian hierarchical models with applications in many fields. Performing Bayesian inference on such models can be challenging as Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms struggle with the…

In this paper, we propose a new stochastic optimization algorithm for Bayesian inference based on multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) methods. In Bayesian statistics, biased estimators of the model evidence have been often used as stochastic…

Slice sampling is a well-established Markov chain Monte Carlo method for (approximate) sampling of target distributions which are only known up to a normalizing constant. The method is based on choosing a new state on a slice, i.e., a…

In this paper, we present a method for computing the marginal likelihood, also known as the model likelihood or Bayesian evidence, from Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), or other sampled posterior distributions. In order to do this, one…

Many Monte Carlo (MC) and importance sampling (IS) methods use mixture models (MMs) for their simplicity and ability to capture multimodal distributions. Recently, subtractive mixture models (SMMs), i.e. MMs with negative coefficients, have…

We propose bandit importance sampling (BIS), a powerful importance sampling framework tailored for settings in which evaluating the target density is computationally expensive. BIS facilitates accurate sampling while minimizing the required…

An efficient simulation-based methodology is proposed for the rolling window estimation of state space models, called particle rolling Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) with double block sampling. In our method, which is based on Sequential…

Atomistic simulations provide valuable insights into the physical processes governing material behavior. However, their applicability is fundamentally constrained by the limited time scales accessible to brute-force simulations. This…

Estimating the probability that a sum of random variables (RVs) exceeds a given threshold is a well-known challenging problem. Closed-form expression of the sum distribution is usually intractable and presents an open problem. A crude Monte…

Multi-sample, importance-weighted variational autoencoders (IWAE) give tighter bounds and more accurate uncertainty estimates than variational autoencoders (VAE) trained with a standard single-sample objective. However, IWAEs scale poorly:…