Related papers: Sampling hyperparameters in hierarchical models: i…

We study Bayesian estimation of mixture models and argue in favor of fitting the marginal posterior distribution over component assignments directly, rather than Gibbs sampling from the joint posterior on components and parameters as is…

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 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…

Bayesian computation crucially relies on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. In the case of massive data sets, running the Metropolis-Hastings sampler to draw from the posterior distribution becomes prohibitive due to the large…

Many inference problems involve inferring the number $N$ of components in some region, along with their properties $\{\mathbf{x}_i\}_{i=1}^N$, from a dataset $\mathcal{D}$. A common statistical example is finite mixture modelling. In the…

We study general coordinate-wise MCMC schemes (such as Metropolis-within-Gibbs samplers), which are commonly used to fit Bayesian non-conjugate hierarchical models. We relate their convergence properties to the ones of the corresponding…

Traditional Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling of hidden Markov models (HMMs) involves latent states underlying an imperfect observation process, and generates posterior samples for top-level parameters concurrently with nuisance…

Particle Markov Chain Monte Carlo (PMCMC) is a general computational approach to Bayesian inference for general state space models. Our article scales up PMCMC in terms of the number of observations and parameters by generating the…

The Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithm is one of the most widely used Markov Chain Monte Carlo schemes for generating samples from Bayesian posterior distributions. The algorithm is asymptotically exact, flexible and easy to implement.…

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…

Inference for Dirichlet process hierarchical models is typically performed using Markov chain Monte Carlo methods, which can be roughly categorised into marginal and conditional methods. The former integrate out analytically the…

The Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) sampling algorithm exploits Hamiltonian dynamics to construct efficient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), which has become increasingly popular in machine learning and statistics. Since HMC uses the gradient…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have not been broadly adopted in Bayesian neural networks (BNNs). This paper initially reviews the main challenges in sampling from the parameter posterior of a neural network via MCMC. Such…

High-dimensional feature selection arises in many areas of modern science. For example, in genomic research we want to find the genes that can be used to separate tissues of different classes (e.g. cancer and normal) from tens of thousands…

This paper introduces a framework for speeding up Bayesian inference conducted in presence of large datasets. We design a Markov chain whose transition kernel uses an (unknown) fraction of (fixed size) of the available data that is randomly…

In many domains, we are interested in analyzing the structure of the underlying distribution, e.g., whether one variable is a direct parent of the other. Bayesian model-selection attempts to find the MAP model and use its structure to…

Latent position network models are a versatile tool in network science; applications include clustering entities, controlling for causal confounders, and defining priors over unobserved graphs. Estimating each node's latent position is…

Bayesian low-rank matrix factorization techniques have become an essential tool for relational data analysis and matrix completion. A standard approach is to assign zero-mean Gaussian priors on the columns or rows of factor matrices to…

In Bayesian inverse problems, the posterior distribution is used to quantify uncertainty about the reconstructed solution. In practice, Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms often are used to draw samples from the posterior distribution.…

Sampling from posterior distributions using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods can require an exhaustive number of iterations, particularly when the posterior is multi-modal as the MCMC sampler can become trapped in a local mode for a…