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Weighted least squares polynomial approximation uses random samples to determine projections of functions onto spaces of polynomials. It has been shown that, using an optimal distribution of sample locations, the number of samples required…
The predictive Bayesian view involves eliciting a sequence of one-step-ahead predictive distributions in lieu of specifying a likelihood function and prior distribution. Recent methods have leveraged predictive distributions which are…
Recent research has led to the development of MCMC algorithms with likelihood-informed proposals when targeting posterior distributions supported on discrete state spaces. Our work is placed within this field and puts forward a new MCMC…
In this paper, a new sampling scheme of the near field radiated by a planar source is proposed and assessed. More in detail, the paper shows a uniform sampling criterion that allows representing the near field over a plane with a number of…
We explore the low-l likelihood of the angular spectrum C(l) of masked CMB temperature maps using an adaptive importance sampler. We find that, in spite of a partial sky coverage, the likelihood distribution of each C(l) closely follows an…
We study a relaxation of the problem of coupling probability distributions -- a list of samples is generated from one distribution and an accept is declared if any one of these samples is identical to the sample generated from the other…
We investigate the efficiency of a marginal likelihood estimator where the product of the marginal posterior distributions is used as an importance-sampling function. The approach is generally applicable to multi-block parameter vector…
Future prediction is a fundamental principle of intelligence that helps plan actions and avoid possible dangers. As the future is uncertain to a large extent, modeling the uncertainty and multimodality of the future states is of great…
Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) samplers are powerful tools for Bayesian inference but suffer from high computational costs due to their reliance on large particle ensembles for accurate estimates. We introduce persistent sampling (PS), an…
We present a method for improving the performance of nested sampling as well as its accuracy. Building on previous work by Chen et al., we show that posterior repartitioning may be used to reduce the amount of time nested sampling spends in…
We propose a novel method for sampling and optimization tasks based on a stochastic interacting particle system. We explain how this method can be used for the following two goals: (i) generating approximate samples from a given target…
In Bayesian statistics, exploring high-dimensional multimodal posterior distributions poses major challenges for existing MCMC approaches. This paper introduces the Annealed Leap-Point Sampler (ALPS), which augments the target distribution…
The empirical Bayes $g$-modeling approach via the nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator (NPMLE) is widely used for large-scale estimation and inference in the normal means problem, yet theoretical guarantees for uncertainty…
This paper provides conditions under which subsampling and the bootstrap can be used to construct estimators of the quantiles of the distribution of a root that behave well uniformly over a large class of distributions $\mathbf{P}$. These…
Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) methods are standard tools for inferring parameters of complex models when the likelihood function is analytically intractable. A popular approach to improving the poor acceptance rate of the basic…
Monte Carlo methods represent the "de facto" standard for approximating complicated integrals involving multidimensional target distributions. In order to generate random realizations from the target distribution, Monte Carlo techniques use…
We describe an MCMC method for sampling distributions with soft constraints, which are constraints that are almost but not exactly satisfied. We sample a total distribution that is a convex combination of the target soft distribution with…
The posterior probability distribution for a set of model parameters encodes all that the data have to tell us in the context of a given model; it is the fundamental quantity for Bayesian parameter estimation. In order to infer the…
Sampling-based motion planners (SBMPs) are widely used to compute dynamically feasible robot paths. However, their reliance on uniform sampling often leads to poor efficiency and slow planning in complex environments. We introduce a novel…
In performing a Bayesian analysis of astronomical data, two difficult problems often emerge. First, in estimating the parameters of some model for the data, the resulting posterior distribution may be multimodal or exhibit pronounced…