Related papers: Markov Chain Truncation for Doubly-Intractable Inf…
We consider estimating an expected infinite-horizon cumulative discounted cost/reward contingent on an underlying stochastic process by Monte Carlo simulation. An unbiased estimator based on truncating the cumulative cost at a random…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a powerful methodology for the approximation of posterior distributions. However, the iterative nature of MCMC does not naturally facilitate its use with modern highly parallel computation on HPC and cloud…
Full Bayesian computational inference for model determination in undirected graphical models is currently restricted to decomposable graphs, except for problems of very small scale. In this paper we develop new, more efficient methodology…
Many exact Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms have been developed for posterior inference in Bayesian nonparametric models which involve infinite-dimensional priors. However, these methods are not generic and special methodology must be…
Intractable posterior distributions of parameters with intractable normalizing constants depending upon the parameters are known as doubly intractable posterior distributions. The terminology itself indicates that obtaining Bayesian…
A non trivial problem that arises in several applications is the estimation of the mean of a truncated normal distribution. In this paper, an iterative deterministic scheme for approximating this mean is proposed. It has been inspired from…
A large number of statistical models are "doubly-intractable": the likelihood normalising term, which is a function of the model parameters, is intractable, as well as the marginal likelihood (model evidence). This means that standard…
In clinical and epidemiological research doubly truncated data often appear. This is the case, for instance, when the data registry is formed by interval sampling. Double truncation generally induces a sampling bias on the target variable,…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a powerful tool for sampling from complex probability distributions. Despite its versatility, MCMC often suffers from strong autocorrelation and the negative sign problem, leading to slowing down the…
Evaluating the degree of partisan districting (Gerrymandering) in a statistical framework typically requires an ensemble of districting plans which are drawn from a prescribed probability distribution that adheres to a realistic and…
We propose a methodology to parallelize Hamiltonian Monte Carlo estimators. Our approach constructs a pair of Hamiltonian Monte Carlo chains that are coupled in such a way that they meet exactly after some random number of iterations. These…
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…
Given a smooth function $f$, we develop a general approach to turn Monte Carlo samples with expectation $m$ into an unbiased estimate of $f(m)$. Specifically, we develop estimators that are based on randomly truncating the Taylor series…
Discrete Markov random fields are undirected graphical models that capture complex conditional dependencies between discrete variables. Conducting exact posterior inference in these models is often computationally challenging because…
Recent advances in Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) extend the scope of Bayesian inference to models for which the likelihood function is intractable. Although these developments allow us to estimate model parameters, other basic problems…
We propose a Monte Carlo algorithm to sample from high dimensional probability distributions that combines Markov chain Monte Carlo and importance sampling. We provide a careful theoretical analysis, including guarantees on robustness to…
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.…
In this article we propose a novel MCMC method based on deterministic transformations T: X x D --> X where X is the state-space and D is some set which may or may not be a subset of X. We refer to our new methodology as Transformation-based…
Interest is in evaluating, by Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation, the expected value of a function with respect to a, possibly unnormalized, probability distribution. A general purpose variance reduction technique for the MCMC…
Bayesian analysis often concerns an evaluation of models with different dimensionality as is necessary in, for example, model selection or mixture models. To facilitate this evaluation, transdimensional Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)…