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Recent advances in stochastic gradient variational inference have made it possible to perform variational Bayesian inference with posterior approximations containing auxiliary random variables. This enables us to explore a new synthesis of…
Statistical inference methods are fundamentally important in machine learning. Most state-of-the-art inference algorithms are variants of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) or variational inference (VI). However, both methods struggle with…
Reparameterizing a probabilisitic system is common advice for improving the performance of a statistical algorithm like Markov chain Monte Carlo, even though in theory such reparameterizations should leave the system, and the performance of…
We propose a new approach to inference in tightly identified and large-scale structural vector autoregressions based on a reparameterization that enables imposing identifying inequality restrictions through continuously differentiable…
By providing a simple and efficient way of computing low-variance gradients of continuous random variables, the reparameterization trick has become the technique of choice for training a variety of latent variable models. However, it is not…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are often used for approximate inference inside learning, but their slow mixing can be difficult to diagnose and the approximations can seriously degrade learning. To alleviate these issues, we…
We develop exact Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for discretely-sampled, directly and indirectly observed diffusions. The qualification "exact" refers to the fact that the invariant and limiting distribution of the Markov chains is the…
We propose a variance reduction framework for variational inference using the Multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) method. Our framework is built on reparameterized gradient estimators and "recycles" parameters obtained from past update history in…
Performing numerical integration when the integrand itself cannot be evaluated point-wise is a challenging task that arises in statistical analysis, notably in Bayesian inference for models with intractable likelihood functions. Markov…
In Bayesian statistics, the choice of the prior can have an important influence on the posterior and the parameter estimation, especially when few data samples are available. To limit the added subjectivity from a priori information, one…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods asymptotically sample from complex probability distributions. The pseudo-marginal MCMC framework only requires an unbiased estimator of the unnormalized probability distribution function to construct…
This paper introduces a Bayesian framework that combines Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling, dimensionality reduction, and neural density estimation to efficiently handle inverse problems that (i) must be solved multiple times, and…
This paper focuses on variational inference with intractable likelihood functions that can be unbiasedly estimated. A flexible variational approximation based on Gaussian mixtures is developed, by adopting the mixture population Monte Carlo…
The Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm is a widely recognised as an efficient method for sampling a specified posterior distribution. However, when the posterior is multi-modal, conventional MCMC algorithms either tend to become…
The reparameterization gradient has become a widely used method to obtain Monte Carlo gradients to optimize the variational objective. However, this technique does not easily apply to commonly used distributions such as beta or gamma…
Incorporating information about the target distribution in proposal mechanisms generally produces efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms (or at least, algorithms that are more efficient than uninformed counterparts). For instance, it…
Discrete choice models are commonly used by applied statisticians in numerous fields, such as marketing, economics, finance, and operations research. When agents in discrete choice models are assumed to have differing preferences, exact…
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…
Mixtures of linear mixed models (MLMMs) are useful for clustering grouped data and can be estimated by likelihood maximization through the EM algorithm. The conventional approach to determining a suitable number of components is to compare…
Envelope models provide a sufficient dimension reduction framework for multivariate regression analysis. Bayesian inference for these models has been developed primarily using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. Specifically, Gibbs…