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Probabilistic models are conceptually powerful tools for finding structure in data, but their practical effectiveness is often limited by our ability to perform inference in them. Exact inference is frequently intractable, so approximate…
Langevin algorithms are popular Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods for large-scale sampling problems that often arise in data science. We propose Monte Carlo algorithms based on the discretizations of $P$-th order Langevin dynamics for…
We present an efficient algorithm for the inference of stochastic block models in large networks. The algorithm can be used as an optimized Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method, with a fast mixing time and a much reduced susceptibility to…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach that exhibits favourable exploration properties in high-dimensional models such as neural networks. Unfortunately, HMC has limited use in large-data regimes and…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a popular and successful general-purpose tool for Bayesian inference. However, MCMC cannot be practically applied to large data sets because of the prohibitive cost of evaluating every likelihood term at…
In this paper, we introduce a hierarchical extension of the stochastic blockmodel to identify multilevel community structures in networks. We also present a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and a variational Bayes algorithm to fit the model…
We present a general framework for accelerating a large class of widely used Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. Our approach exploits fast, iterative approximations to the target density to speculatively evaluate many potential…
A Monte Carlo algorithm is said to be adaptive if it automatically calibrates its current proposal distribution using past simulations. The choice of the parametric family that defines the set of proposal distributions is critical for good…
Inference after model selection presents computational challenges when dealing with intractable conditional distributions. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a common method for sampling from these distributions, but its slow convergence…
This paper considers a new approach to using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) in contexts where one may adopt multilevel (ML) Monte Carlo. The underlying problem is to approximate expectations w.r.t. an underlying probability measure that is…
Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods comprise one of the most successful approaches to approximate Bayesian filtering. However, SMC without good proposal distributions struggle in high dimensions. We propose nested sequential Monte Carlo…
Standard MCMC methods can scale poorly to big data settings due to the need to evaluate the likelihood at each iteration. There have been a number of approximate MCMC algorithms that use sub-sampling ideas to reduce this computational…
Stochastic approximation Monte Carlo (SAMC) has recently been proposed by Liang, Liu and Carroll [J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 102 (2007) 305--320] as a general simulation and optimization algorithm. In this paper, we propose to improve its…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) has emerged as a powerful Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method to sample from complex continuous distributions. However, a fundamental limitation of HMC is that it can not be applied to distributions with…
Monte Carlo methods, such as Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), remain the most regularly-used approach for implementing Bayesian inference. However, the computational cost of these approaches usually scales worse than linearly with the…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling is an important and commonly used tool for the analysis of hierarchical models. Nevertheless, practitioners generally have two options for MCMC: utilize existing software that generates a black-box…
In this paper we propose to evaluate and compare Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods to estimate the parameters in a generalized extreme value model. We employed the Bayesian approach using traditional Metropolis-Hastings methods,…
In many applications of Bayesian clustering, posterior sampling on the discrete state space of cluster allocations is achieved via Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques. As it is typically challenging to design transition kernels to…
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.…
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…