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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…

Computation · Statistics 2016-02-12 Richard G. Everitt , Adam M. Johansen , Ellen Rowing , Melina Evdemon-Hogan

Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) is computationally intensive for complex model simulators. To exploit expensive simulations, data-resampling via bootstrapping can be employed to obtain many artificial datasets at little cost.…

Computation · Statistics 2021-07-05 Umberto Picchini , Richard G. Everitt

We develop a new method to sample from posterior distributions in hierarchical models without using Markov chain Monte Carlo. This method, which is a variant of importance sampling ideas, is generally applicable to high-dimensional models…

Computation · Statistics 2015-03-19 Michael Braun , Paul Damien

Bayesian inference with Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is challenging when the likelihood function is irregular and expensive to compute. We explore several sampling algorithms that make use of subset evaluations to reduce computational…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-16 Conor Rosato , Harvinder Lehal , Simon Maskell , Lee Devlin , Malcolm Strens

Synthetic likelihood is an attractive approach to likelihood-free inference when an approximately Gaussian summary statistic for the data, informative for inference about the parameters, is available. The synthetic likelihood method derives…

Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) is a popular inference method when likelihoods are hard to come by. Practical bottlenecks of ABC applications include selecting statistics that summarize the data without losing too much information or…

Computation · Statistics 2026-05-15 Khanh N. Dinh , Cécile Liu , Zijin Xiang , Zhihan Liu , Simon Tavaré

In this article, we describe a {\tt R} package for sampling from an empirical likelihood-based posterior using a Hamiltonian Monte Carlo method. Empirical likelihood-based methodologies have been used in Bayesian modeling of many problems…

Other Statistics · Statistics 2022-09-07 Dang Trung Kien , Neo Han Wei , Sanjay Chaudhuri

This paper considers properties of an optimization based sampler for targeting the posterior distribution when the likelihood is intractable and auxiliary statistics are used to summarize information in the data. Our reverse sampler…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-12-02 Jean-Jacques Forneron , Serena Ng

Methods for Bayesian simulation in the presence of computationally intractable likelihood functions are of growing interest. Termed likelihood-free samplers, standard simulation algorithms such as Markov chain Monte Carlo have been adapted…

Computation · Statistics 2010-05-31 S. A. Sisson , G. W. Peters , M. Briers , Y. Fan

Approaches to Bayesian inference for problems with intractable likelihoods have become increasingly important in recent years. Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) and "likelihood free" Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques are popular…

Computation · Statistics 2014-10-03 Jamie Owen , Darren J. Wilkinson , Colin S. Gillespie

Bayesian inference allows us to define a posterior distribution over the weights of a generic neural network (NN). Exact posteriors are usually intractable, in which case approximations can be employed. One such approximation - variational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Andrew Millard , Joshua Murphy , Peter Green , Simon Maskell

Using Markov chain Monte Carlo to sample from posterior distributions was the key innovation which made Bayesian data analysis practical. Notoriously, however, MCMC is hard to tune, hard to diagnose, and hard to parallelize. This…

Computation · Statistics 2022-03-18 Cosma Rohilla Shalizi

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.…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2018-03-13 D. Andrew Brown , Arvind Saibaba , Sarah Vallélian

Likelihood-free Bayesian inference algorithms are popular methods for calibrating the parameters of complex, stochastic models, required when the likelihood of the observed data is intractable. These algorithms characteristically rely…

Computation · Statistics 2021-12-23 Thomas P Prescott , David J Warne , Ruth E Baker

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-10 Giuseppe Arena , Maarten Marsman

Bayesian inference for models that have an intractable partition function is known as a doubly intractable problem, where standard Monte Carlo methods are not applicable. The past decade has seen the development of auxiliary variable Monte…

Computation · Statistics 2017-10-13 Richard G. Everitt , Dennis Prangle , Philip Maybank , Mark Bell

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…

Computation · Statistics 2019-12-12 Minh-Ngoc Tran , Marcel Scharth , David Gunawan , Robert Kohn , Scott D. Brown , Guy E. Hawkins

Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) is a useful class of methods for Bayesian inference when the likelihood function is computationally intractable. In practice, the basic ABC algorithm may be inefficient in the presence of discrepancy…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-05-14 Stefano Cabras , Maria Eugenia Castellanos Nueda , Erlis Ruli

High-dimensional data are routinely collected in many areas. We are particularly interested in Bayesian classification models in which one or more variables are imbalanced. Current Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms for posterior…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-01-15 Deborshee Sen , Matthias Sachs , Jianfeng Lu , David Dunson

Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) or likelihood-free inference algorithms are used to find approximations to posterior distributions without making explicit use of the likelihood function, depending instead on simulation of sample data…

Computation · Statistics 2015-09-08 Richard D. Wilkinson