Related papers: Markov Chain Truncation for Doubly-Intractable Inf…
Bayesian inference for Markov processes has become increasingly relevant in recent years. Problems of this type often have intractable likelihoods and prior knowledge about model rate parameters is often poor. Markov Chain Monte Carlo…
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…
Discrete Markov random fields form a natural class of models to represent images and spatial data sets. The use of such models is, however, hampered by a computationally intractable normalising constant. This makes parameter estimation and…
We investigate the complexity of covariance matrix estimation for Gibbs distributions based on dependent samples from a Markov chain. We show that when $\pi$ satisfies a Poincar\'e inequality and the chain possesses a spectral gap, we can…
For a sample of Exponentially distributed durations we aim at point estimation and a confidence interval for its parameter. A duration is only observed if it has ended within a certain time interval, determined by a Uniform distribution.…
Doubly robust methods hold considerable promise for off-policy evaluation in Markov decision processes (MDPs) under sequential ignorability: They have been shown to converge as $1/\sqrt{T}$ with the horizon $T$, to be statistically…
We present general principles for the design and analysis of unbiased Monte Carlo estimators in a wide range of settings. Our estimators posses finite work-normalized variance under mild regularity conditions. We apply our estimators to…
This paper introduces a new algorithm for numerically computing equilibrium (i.e. stationary) distributions for Markov chains and Markov jump processes with either a very large finite state space or a countably infinite state space. The…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are a popular technique in Bayesian statistical modeling. They have long been used to obtain samples from posterior distributions, but recent research has focused on the scalability of these…
We establish an ordering criterion for the asymptotic variances of two consistent Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) estimators: an importance sampling (IS) estimator, based on an approximate reversible chain and subsequent IS weighting, and a…
Most Markov chain Monte Carlo methods operate in discrete time and are reversible with respect to the target probability. Nevertheless, it is now understood that the use of non-reversible Markov chains can be beneficial in many contexts. In…
Bayesian inference under a set of priors, called robust Bayesian analysis, allows for estimation of parameters within a model and quantification of epistemic uncertainty in quantities of interest by bounded (or imprecise) probability.…
An important problem arising in the study of complex networks, for instance in community detection and motif finding, is the sampling of graphs with fixed degree sequence. The equivalent problem of generating random 0,1 matrices with fixed…
We consider the approximation of expectations with respect to the distribution of a latent Markov process given noisy measurements. This is known as the smoothing problem and is often approached with particle and Markov chain Monte Carlo…
We examine the problem of estimating the trace of a matrix $A$ when given access to an oracle which computes $x^\dagger A x$ for an input vector $x$. We make use of the basis vectors from a set of mutually unbiased bases, widely studied in…
Improving efficiency of importance sampler is at the center of research in Monte Carlo methods. While adaptive approach is usually difficult within the Markov Chain Monte Carlo framework, the counterpart in importance sampling can be…
We introduce overdispersed black-box variational inference, a method to reduce the variance of the Monte Carlo estimator of the gradient in black-box variational inference. Instead of taking samples from the variational distribution, we use…
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…
We consider the problem of drawing samples from posterior distributions formed under a Dirichlet prior and a truncated multinomial likelihood, by which we mean a Multinomial likelihood function where we condition on one or more counts being…
Models for which the likelihood function can be evaluated only up to a parameter-dependent unknown normalising constant, such as Markov random field models, are used widely in computer science, statistical physics, spatial statistics, and…