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We propose a novel sampling framework for inference in probabilistic models: an active learning approach that converges more quickly (in wall-clock time) than Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) benchmarks. The central challenge in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-11-04 Tom Gunter , Michael A. Osborne , Roman Garnett , Philipp Hennig , Stephen J. Roberts

Many modern unsupervised or semi-supervised machine learning algorithms rely on Bayesian probabilistic models. These models are usually intractable and thus require approximate inference. Variational inference (VI) lets us approximate a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-24 Cheng Zhang , Judith Butepage , Hedvig Kjellstrom , Stephan Mandt

Traditionally, the field of computational Bayesian statistics has been divided into two main subfields: variational methods and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). In recent years, however, several methods have been proposed based on combining…

Computation · Statistics 2017-04-19 Cheng Zhang , Babak Shahbaba , Hongkai Zhao

Bayesian inference in the physical sciences faces a fundamental challenge: the imperative for high-fidelity physical modeling often clashes with the intrinsic limitations of stochastic sampling algorithms. Complex, high-dimensional…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2026-04-09 Bo Liang , Chang Liu , Hanlin Song , Tianyu Zhao , Minghui Du , He Wang , Haohao Gu , Sensen He , Yuxiang Xu , Wei-Liang Qian , Li-e Qiang , Peng Xu , Ziren Luo , Mingming Sun

We introduce Preconditioned Monte Carlo (PMC), a novel Monte Carlo method for Bayesian inference that facilitates efficient sampling of probability distributions with non-trivial geometry. PMC utilises a Normalising Flow (NF) in order to…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2022-08-24 Minas Karamanis , Florian Beutler , John A. Peacock , David Nabergoj , Uros Seljak

Dynamic factor models are often estimated by point-estimation methods, disregarding parameter uncertainty. We propose a method accounting for parameter uncertainty by means of posterior approximation, using variational inference. Our…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-10-14 Erik Spånberg

We present a novel Bayesian inference tool that uses a neural network to parameterise efficient Markov Chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC) proposals. The target distribution is first transformed into a diagonal, unit variance Gaussian by a series of…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2020-06-03 Adam Moss

Computer models play a crucial role in numerous scientific and engineering domains. To ensure the accuracy of simulations, it is essential to properly calibrate the input parameters of these models through statistical inference. While…

Applications · Statistics 2024-03-07 Dongkyu Derek Cho , Won Chang , Jaewoo Park

Inverse problems, i.e., estimating parameters of physical models from experimental data, are ubiquitous in science and engineering. The Bayesian formulation is the gold standard because it alleviates ill-posedness issues and quantifies…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-28 Sharmila Karumuri , Ilias Bilionis

Bayesian inference promises to ground and improve the performance of deep neural networks. It promises to be robust to overfitting, to simplify the training procedure and the space of hyperparameters, and to provide a calibrated measure of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-12 Jonathan Heek , Nal Kalchbrenner

Bayesian neural network models (BNN) have re-surged in recent years due to the advancement of scalable computations and its utility in solving complex prediction problems in a wide variety of applications. Despite the popularity and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-11-20 Shrijita Bhattacharya , Zihuan Liu , Tapabrata Maiti

Solving Bayesian inference problems approximately with variational approaches can provide fast and accurate results. Capturing correlation within the approximation requires an explicit parametrization. This intrinsically limits this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-01-31 Jakob Knollmüller , Torsten A. Enßlin

Variational inference is a powerful paradigm for approximate Bayesian inference with a number of appealing properties, including support for model learning and data subsampling. By contrast MCMC methods like Hamiltonian Monte Carlo do not…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-07-14 Martin Jankowiak , Du Phan

The rigorous quantification of uncertainty in geophysical inversions is a challenging problem. Inversions are often ill-posed and the likelihood surface may be multi-modal; properties of any single mode become inadequate uncertainty…

Neyman-Scott processes (NSPs) have been applied across a range of fields to model points or temporal events with a hierarchy of clusters. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is typically used for posterior sampling in the model. However, MCMC's…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-03-08 Chengkuan Hong , Christian R. Shelton

Many scientific and engineering problems require to perform Bayesian inferences in function spaces, in which the unknowns are of infinite dimension. In such problems, many standard Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms become arbitrary…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2016-04-12 Zhe Feng , Jinglai Li

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-05 Nils Baillie , Antoine Van Biesbroeck , Clément Gauchy

Variable selection is a classic problem in statistics. In this paper, we consider a Bayes variable selection problem based on spike-and-slab prior with mixed normal distribution proposed by Ro\v{c}kov\'a and George (2014). Motivated by…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-03-08 Lin Guoqiang

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) proves to be powerful for Bayesian inference and in particular for exoplanet radial velocity fitting because MCMC provides more statistical information and makes better use of data than common approaches like…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2014-01-30 Fengji Hou , Jonathan Goodman , David W. Hogg , Jonathan Weare , Christian Schwab

Importance sampling (IS) is commonly used for cross validation (CV) in Bayesian models, because it only involves reweighting existing posterior draws without needing to re-estimate the model by re-running Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC).…

Computation · Statistics 2025-08-12 Geonhee Han , Andrew Gelman