Related papers: Markov Chain Truncation for Doubly-Intractable Inf…
Performing numerical integration when the integrand itself cannot be evaluated point-wise is a challenging task that arises in statistical analysis, notably in Bayesian inference for models with intractable likelihood functions. Markov…
We propose a method to efficiently integrate truncated probability densities. The method uses Markov chain Monte Carlo method to sample from a probability density matching the function being integrated. The required normalisation or…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods provide consistent of integrals as the number of iterations goes to infinity. MCMC estimators are generally biased after any fixed number of iterations. We propose to remove this bias by using…
We provide a general methodology for unbiased estimation for intractable stochastic models. We consider situations where the target distribution can be written as an appropriate limit of distributions, and where conventional approaches…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are routinely used to draw samples from distributions with intractable normalization constants. However, standard MCMC algorithms do not apply to doubly-intractable distributions in which there are…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods asymptotically sample from complex probability distributions. The pseudo-marginal MCMC framework only requires an unbiased estimator of the unnormalized probability distribution function to construct…
Completely random measures provide a principled approach to creating flexible unsupervised models, where the number of latent features is infinite and the number of features that influence the data grows with the size of the data set. Due…
Posterior distributions often feature intractable normalizing constants, called marginal likelihoods or evidence, that are useful for model comparison via Bayes factors. This has motivated a number of methods for estimating ratios of…
In this article, we consider computing expectations w.r.t. probability measures which are subject to discretization error. Examples include partially observed diffusion processes or inverse problems, where one may have to discretize time…
We introduce a generalization of the Adaptive Multilevel Splitting algorithm in the discrete time dynamic setting, namely when it is applied to sample rare events associated with paths of Markov chains. By interpreting the algorithm as a…
In sampling tasks, it is common for target distributions to be known up to a normalizing constant. However, in many situations, even evaluating the unnormalized distribution can be costly or infeasible. This issue arises in scenarios such…
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…
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…
A key quantity of interest in Bayesian inference are expectations of functions with respect to a posterior distribution. Markov Chain Monte Carlo is a fundamental tool to consistently compute these expectations via averaging samples drawn…
In parameter estimation problems one computes a posterior distribution over uncertain parameters defined jointly by a prior distribution, a model, and noisy data. Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is often used for the numerical solution of…
To recover a low rank structure from a noisy matrix, truncated singular value decomposition has been extensively used and studied. Recent studies suggested that the signal can be better estimated by shrinking the singular values. We pursue…
Doubly intractable distributions arise in many settings, for example in Markov models for point processes and exponential random graph models for networks. Bayesian inference for these models is challenging because they involve intractable…
Markov chain (MC) algorithms are ubiquitous in machine learning and statistics and many other disciplines. Typically, these algorithms can be formulated as acceptance rejection methods. In this work we present a novel estimator applicable…
Randomising networks using a naive `accept-all' edge-swap algorithm is generally biased. Building on recent results for nondirected graphs, we construct an ergodic detailed balance Markov chain with non-trivial acceptance probabilities for…
For rare events described in terms of Markov processes, truly unbiased estimation of the rare event probability generally requires the avoidance of numerical approximations of the Markov process. Recent work in the exact and…