Related papers: Markov Chain Truncation for Doubly-Intractable Inf…
Consider a process, stochastic or deterministic, obtained by using a numerical integration scheme, or from Monte-Carlo methods involving an approximation to an integral, or a Newton-Raphson iteration to approximate the root of an equation.…
Probabilistic databases play a crucial role in the management and understanding of uncertain data. However, incorporating probabilities into the semantics of incomplete databases has posed many challenges, forcing systems to sacrifice…
In Bayesian inference, we seek to compute information about random variables such as moments or quantiles on the basis of {available data} and prior information. When the distribution of random variables is {intractable}, Monte Carlo (MC)…
We provide an efficient algorithm for the classical problem, going back to Galton, Pearson, and Fisher, of estimating, with arbitrary accuracy the parameters of a multivariate normal distribution from truncated samples. Truncated samples…
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…
Bayesian hierarchical modeling is a popular approach to capturing unobserved heterogeneity across individual units. However, standard estimation methods such as Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) can be impracticable for modeling outcomes from…
Monte Carlo sampling techniques have broad applications in machine learning, Bayesian posterior inference, and parameter estimation. Often the target distribution takes the form of a product distribution over a dataset with a large number…
Scalable Gaussian Process methods are computationally attractive, yet introduce modeling biases that require rigorous study. This paper analyzes two common techniques: early truncated conjugate gradients (CG) and random Fourier features…
Although exchangeable processes from Bayesian nonparametrics have been used as a generating mechanism for random partition models, we deviate from this paradigm to explicitly incorporate clustering information in the formulation of our…
Variational inference approximates the posterior distribution of a probabilistic model with a parameterized density by maximizing a lower bound for the model evidence. Modern solutions fit a flexible approximation with stochastic gradient…
Adaptive importance sampling is a widely spread Monte Carlo technique that uses a re-weighting strategy to iteratively estimate the so-called target distribution. A major drawback of adaptive importance sampling is the large variance of the…
Delayed-acceptance Markov chain Monte Carlo (DA-MCMC) samples from a probability distribution via a two-stages version of the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm, by combining the target distribution with a "surrogate" (i.e. an approximate and…
This article proposes a new method of truncated estimation to estimate the tail index $\alpha$ of the extremely heavy-tailed distribution with infinite mean or variance. We not only present two truncated estimators $\hat{\alpha}$ and…
This article presents a Bayesian inferential method where the likelihood for a model is unknown but where data can easily be simulated from the model. We discretize simulated (continuous) data to estimate the implicit likelihood in a…
We present an algorithm that can efficiently compute a broad class of inferences for discrete-time imprecise Markov chains, a generalised type of Markov chains that allows one to take into account partially specified probabilities and other…
We introduce a new class of Monte Carlo based approximations of expectations of random variables such that their laws are only available via certain discretizations. Sampling from the discretized versions of these laws can typically…
In the design and analysis of political redistricting maps, it is often useful to be able to sample from the space of all partitions of the graph of census blocks into connected subgraphs of equal population. There are influential Markov…
We propose an adaptive importance sampling scheme for Gaussian approximations of intractable posteriors. Optimization-based approximations like variational inference can be too inaccurate while existing Monte Carlo methods can be too slow.…
Importance sampling is a Monte Carlo method that introduces a proposal distribution to sample the space according to the target distribution. Yet calibration of the proposal distribution is essential to achieving efficiency, thus the resort…
This paper addresses the issue of estimating the expectation of a real-valued random variable of the form $X = g(\mathbf{U})$ where $g$ is a deterministic function and $\mathbf{U}$ can be a random finite- or infinite-dimensional vector.…