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Mixture modelling using elliptical distributions promises enhanced robustness, flexibility and stability over the widely employed Gaussian mixture model (GMM). However, existing studies based on the elliptical mixture model (EMM) are…

Ensembling is among the most popular tools in machine learning (ML) due to its effectiveness in minimizing variance and thus improving generalization. Most ensembling methods for black-box base learners fall under the umbrella of "stacked…

Bayesian analysis is widely used in science and engineering for real-time forecasting, decision making, and to help unravel the processes that explain the observed data. These data are some deterministic and/or stochastic transformations of…

Maximum likelihood (ML) learning for energy-based models (EBMs) is challenging, partly due to non-convergence of Markov chain Monte Carlo.Several variations of ML learning have been proposed, but existing methods all fail to achieve both…

Monte Carlo integration is a powerful tool for scientific and statistical computation, but faces significant challenges when the integrand is a multi-modal distribution, even when the mode locations are known. This work introduces novel…

The EM (Expectation-Maximization) algorithm is regarded as an MM (Majorization-Minimization) algorithm for maximum likelihood estimation of statistical models. Expanding this view, this paper demonstrates that by choosing an appropriate…

Temperature Accelerated Sliced Sampling (TASS) is an efficient method to compute high dimensional free energy landscapes. The original TASS method employs the Weighted Histogram Analysis Method (WHAM) which is an iterative post-processing…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling methods are widely used but often encounter either slow convergence or biased sampling when applied to multimodal high dimensional distributions. In this paper, we present a general framework of…

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is an efficient method of simulating smooth distributions and has motivated the widely used No-U-turn Sampler (NUTS) and software Stan. We build on NUTS and the technique of "unbiased sampling" to design HMC…

To sample from a given target distribution, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling relies on constructing an ergodic Markov chain with the target distribution as its invariant measure. For any MCMC method, an important question is how to…

We introduce the Hamming Ball Sampler, a novel Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm, for efficient inference in statistical models involving high-dimensional discrete state spaces. The sampling scheme uses an auxiliary variable construction…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, such as the Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithm, are widely used for Bayesian inference. One of the most important issues for any MCMC method is the convergence of the Markov chain, which depends…

Bayesian models have become very popular over the last years in several fields such as signal processing, statistics, and machine learning. Bayesian inference requires the approximation of complicated integrals involving posterior…

Monte Carlo (MC) methods are widely used for Bayesian inference and optimization in statistics, signal processing and machine learning. A well-known class of MC methods are Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. In order to foster…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have a drawback when working with a target distribution or likelihood function that is computationally expensive to evaluate, specially when working with big data. This paper focuses on…

MCMC methods (Monte Carlo Markov Chain) are a class of methods used to perform simulations per a probability distribution $P$. These methods are often used when we have difficulties to directly sample per a given probability distribution…

This paper investigates an under-explored but important problem: given a collection of pre-trained neural networks, predicting their performance on each multi-modal task without fine-tuning them, such as image recognition, referring,…

Calculating averages with respect to multimodal probability distributions is often necessary in applications. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods to this end, which are based on time averages along a realization of a Markov process…

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…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods require a large number of samples to approximate a posterior distribution, which can be costly when the likelihood or prior is expensive to evaluate. The number of samples can be reduced if we can…