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Importance sampling is a popular technique in Bayesian inference: by reweighting samples drawn from a proposal distribution we are able to obtain samples and moment estimates from a Bayesian posterior over latent variables. Recent work,…

Computation · Statistics 2024-06-19 Sam Bowyer , Thomas Heap , Laurence Aitchison

This paper is concerned with Bayesian inference when the likelihood is analytically intractable but can be unbiasedly estimated. We propose an annealed importance sampling procedure for estimating expectations with respect to the posterior.…

Methodology · Statistics 2014-02-26 M. -N. Tran , C. Strickland , M. K. Pitt , R. Kohn

In including random effects to account for dependent observations, the odds ratio interpretation of logistic regression coefficients is changed from population-averaged to subject-specific. This is unappealing in many applications,…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-04 Changwoo J. Lee , David B. Dunson

Given a set of possible models (e.g., Bayesian network structures) and a data sample, in the unsupervised model selection problem the task is to choose the most accurate model with respect to the domain joint probability distribution. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-01-18 Sanjoy Dasgupta , Leonard Schulman

Bayesian model selection provides a powerful framework for objectively comparing models directly from observed data, without reference to ground truth data. However, Bayesian model selection requires the computation of the marginal…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-01-17 Xiaohao Cai , Jason D. McEwen , Marcelo Pereyra

We consider the problem of sampling from an unknown distribution for which only a sufficiently large number of training samples are available. In this paper, we build on previous work combining Schr\"odinger bridges and plug & play Langevin…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-11-19 Georg A. Gottwald , Sebastian Reich

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

Comparison of appropriate models to describe observational data is a fundamental task of science. The Bayesian model evidence, or marginal likelihood, is a computationally challenging, yet crucial, quantity to estimate to perform Bayesian…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2023-11-10 A. Spurio Mancini , M. M. Docherty , M. A. Price , J. D. McEwen

We propose a fast and theoretically grounded method for Bayesian variable selection and model averaging in latent variable regression models. Our framework addresses three interrelated challenges: (i) intractable marginal likelihoods, (ii)…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-09-16 Gregor Zens , Mark F. J. Steel

The marginal likelihood is a well established model selection criterion in Bayesian statistics. It also allows to efficiently calculate the marginal posterior model probabilities that can be used for Bayesian model averaging of quantities…

Computation · Statistics 2016-11-07 Aliaksandr Hubin , Geir Storvik

Exponential random graph models are an important tool in the statistical analysis of data. However, Bayesian parameter estimation for these models is extremely challenging, since evaluation of the posterior distribution typically involves…

Computation · Statistics 2017-05-05 Lampros Bouranis , Nial Friel , Florian Maire

Computing the marginal likelihood (also called the Bayesian model evidence) is an important task in Bayesian model selection, providing a principled quantitative way to compare models. The learned harmonic mean estimator solves the…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-01-22 Alicja Polanska , Matthew A. Price , Alessio Spurio Mancini , Jason D. McEwen

Optimization is widely used in statistics, and often efficiently delivers point estimates on useful spaces involving structural constraints or combinatorial structure. To quantify uncertainty, Gibbs posterior exponentiates the negative loss…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-07-23 Cheng Zeng , Eleni Dilma , Jason Xu , Leo L Duan

The marginal likelihood is a central tool for drawing Bayesian inference about the number of components in mixture models. It is often approximated since the exact form is unavailable. A bias in the approximation may be due to an incomplete…

Computation · Statistics 2014-11-14 Jeong Eun Lee , Christian P. Robert

Nonprobability (convenience) samples are increasingly sought to stabilize estimations for one or more population variables of interest that are performed using a randomized survey (reference) sample by increasing the effective sample size.…

Sampling from unnormalized densities using diffusion models has emerged as a powerful paradigm. However, while recent approaches that use least-squares `matching' objectives have improved scalability, they often necessitate significant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Denis Blessing , Lorenz Richter , Julius Berner , Egor Malitskiy , Gerhard Neumann

We investigate the utility to computational Bayesian analyses of a particular family of recursive marginal likelihood estimators characterized by the (equivalent) algorithms known as "biased sampling" or "reverse logistic regression" in the…

Methodology · Statistics 2014-10-16 Ewan Cameron , Anthony Pettitt

We propose sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods for sampling the posterior distribution of state-space models under highly informative observation regimes, a situation in which standard SMC methods can perform poorly. A special case is…

Computation · Statistics 2015-07-10 Pierre Del Moral , Lawrence M. Murray

In this paper we develop a methodology that we call split sampling methods to estimate high dimensional expectations and rare event probabilities. Split sampling uses an auxiliary variable MCMC simulation and expresses the expectation of…

Computation · Statistics 2013-11-04 John R. Birge , Changgee Chang , Nicholas G. Polson

Survey sampling plays an important role in the efficient allocation and management of resources. The essence of survey sampling lies in acquiring a sample of data points from a population and subsequently using this sample to estimate the…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-01-29 Jonne Pohjankukka , Sakari Tuominen , Jukka Heikkonen