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Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART) is a popular Bayesian non-parametric regression algorithm. The posterior is a distribution over sums of decision trees, and predictions are made by averaging approximate samples from the posterior.…
Computing the marginal likelihood or evidence is one of the core challenges in Bayesian analysis. While there are many established methods for estimating this quantity, they predominantly rely on using a large number of posterior samples…
Exploration of the intractable posterior distributions associated with Bayesian versions of the general linear mixed model is often performed using Markov chain Monte Carlo. In particular, if a conditionally conjugate prior is used, then…
Proximal Markov Chain Monte Carlo is a novel construct that lies at the intersection of Bayesian computation and convex optimization, which helped popularize the use of nondifferentiable priors in Bayesian statistics. Existing formulations…
Practitioners of Bayesian statistics have long depended on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) to obtain samples from intractable posterior distributions. Unfortunately, MCMC algorithms are typically serial, and do not scale to the large…
It has become increasingly easy nowadays to collect approximate posterior samples via fast algorithms such as variational Bayes, but concerns exist about the estimation accuracy. It is tempting to build solutions that exploit approximate…
In this paper, we present a method for computing the marginal likelihood, also known as the model likelihood or Bayesian evidence, from Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), or other sampled posterior distributions. In order to do this, one…
To deal with very large datasets a mini-batch version of the Monte Carlo Markov Chain Stochastic Approximation Expectation-Maximization algorithm for general latent variable models is proposed. For exponential models the algorithm is shown…
Generalized linear mixed models (GLMMs) are often used for analyzing correlated non-Gaussian data. The likelihood function in a GLMM is available only as a high dimensional integral, and thus closed-form inference and prediction are not…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have not been broadly adopted in Bayesian neural networks (BNNs). This paper initially reviews the main challenges in sampling from the parameter posterior of a neural network via MCMC. Such…
We introduce a unified framework to estimate the convergence of Markov chains to equilibrium in Wasserstein distance. The framework can provide convergence bounds with rates ranging from polynomial to exponential, all derived from a…
We investigate the convergence properties of popular data-augmentation samplers for Bayesian probit regression. Leveraging recent results on Gibbs samplers for log-concave targets, we provide simple and explicit non-asymptotic bounds on the…
This paper advocates proximal Markov Chain Monte Carlo (ProxMCMC) as a flexible and general Bayesian inference framework for constrained or regularized estimation. Originally introduced in the Bayesian imaging literature, ProxMCMC employs…
Radial velocity (RV) planet searches are increasingly finding planets with small velocity amplitudes, with long orbital periods, or in multiple planet systems. Bayesian inference has the potential to improve the interpretation of existing…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are ubiquitous in Bayesian computations. However, they need to access the full data set in order to evaluate the posterior density at every step of the algorithm. This results in a great…
This study introduces a computationally efficient algorithm, delayed acceptance Markov chain Monte Carlo (DA-MCMC), designed to improve posterior simulation in quasi-Bayesian inference. Quasi-Bayesian methods, which do not require fully…
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…
An important problem in the implementation of Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms is to determine the convergence time, or the number of iterations before the chain is close to stationarity. For many Markov chains used in practice this time…
Exponential random graph models are extremely difficult models to handle from a statistical viewpoint, since their normalising constant, which depends on model parameters, is available only in very trivial cases. We show how inference can…
A common tool in the practice of Markov Chain Monte Carlo is to use approximating transition kernels to speed up computation when the desired kernel is slow to evaluate or intractable. A limited set of quantitative tools exist to assess the…