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Bayesian analysis is increasingly popular for use in social science and other application areas where the data are observations from an informative sample. An informative sampling design leads to inclusion probabilities that are correlated…
Sampling from posterior distributions using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods can require an exhaustive number of iterations, particularly when the posterior is multi-modal as the MCMC sampler can become trapped in a local mode for a…
Slice sampling is a well-established Markov chain Monte Carlo method for (approximate) sampling of target distributions which are only known up to a normalizing constant. The method is based on choosing a new state on a slice, i.e., a…
In ill-posed inverse problems, it is commonly desirable to obtain insight into the full spectrum of plausible solutions, rather than extracting only a single reconstruction. Information about the plausible solutions and their likelihoods is…
Many machine learning applications require operating on a spatially distributed dataset. Despite technological advances, privacy considerations and communication constraints may prevent gathering the entire dataset in a central unit. In…
Bayesian inference in the presence of an intractable likelihood function is computationally challenging. When following a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach to approximate the posterior distribution in this context, one typically…
We present a method for fast optimal estimation of the temperature angular power spectrum from observations of the cosmic microwave background. We employ a Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) sampler to obtain samples from the posterior…
Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods, also known as particle filters, are simulation-based recursive algorithms for the approximation of the a posteriori probability measures generated by state-space dynamical models. At any given time $t$,…
This thesis describes work on two applications of probabilistic programming: the learning of probabilistic program code given specifications, in particular program code of one-dimensional samplers; and the facilitation of sequential Monte…
We consider the inverse problem of determining the geometry of penetrable objects from scattering data generated by one incident wave at a fixed frequency. We first study an orthogonality sampling type method which is fast, simple to…
An easy-to-implement form of the Metropolis Algorithm is described which, unlike most standard techniques, is well suited to sampling from multi-modal distributions on spaces with moderate numbers of dimensions (order ten) in environments…
In this paper, we consider the problem of numerical investigation of the counting statistics for a class of one-dimensional systems. Importance sampling, the cornerstone technique usually implemented for such problems, critically hinges on…
We develop an efficient posterior sampling scheme for the Poisson INGARCH models. The proposed method is based on the approximation of the posterior density that exploits the Poisson limit of the negative binomial distribution. It allows us…
This paper is a tutorial and literature review on sampling algorithms. We have two main types of sampling in statistics. The first type is survey sampling which draws samples from a set or population. The second type is sampling from…
The family of log-concave density functions contains various kinds of common probability distributions. Due to the shape restriction, it is possible to find the nonparametric estimate of the density, for example, the nonparametric maximum…
Bayesian inference for spatial point patterns is often hindered computationally by intractable likelihoods. In the frequentist literature, estimating equations utilizing pseudolikelihoods have long been used for simulation-free parameter…
Particle filtering is used to compute good nonlinear estimates of complex systems. It samples trajectories from a chosen distribution and computes the estimate as a weighted average. Easy-to-sample distributions often lead to degenerate…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are routinely used to draw samples from distributions with intractable normalization constants. However, standard MCMC algorithms do not apply to doubly-intractable distributions in which there are…
We study the task of efficiently sampling from a Gibbs distribution $d \pi^* = e^{-h} d {vol}_g$ over a Riemannian manifold $M$ via (geometric) Langevin MCMC; this algorithm involves computing exponential maps in random Gaussian directions…
We consider Ising mixed $p$-spin glasses at high-temperature and without external field, and study the problem of sampling from the Gibbs distribution $\mu$ in polynomial time. We develop a new sampling algorithm with complexity of the same…