Related papers: MLE-induced Likelihood for Markov Random Fields

Exact MLE for generalized linear mixed models (GLMMs) is a long-standing problem unsolved until today. The proposed research solves the problem. In this problem, the main difficulty is caused by intractable integrals in the likelihood…

Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) of latent variable models is often recast as the minimization of a free energy functional over an extended space of parameters and probability distributions. This perspective was recently combined with…

We explore past and recent developments in rare-event probability estimation with a particular focus on a novel Monte Carlo technique Empirical Likelihood Maximization (ELM). This is a versatile method that involves sampling from a sequence…

Lifted probabilistic inference algorithms have been successfully applied to a large number of symmetric graphical models. Unfortunately, the majority of real-world graphical models is asymmetric. This is even the case for relational…

We consider learning a sparse pairwise Markov Random Field (MRF) with continuous-valued variables from i.i.d samples. We adapt the algorithm of Vuffray et al. (2019) to this setting and provide finite-sample analysis revealing sample…

Discrete Markov random fields form a natural class of models to represent images and spatial data sets. The use of such models is, however, hampered by a computationally intractable normalising constant. This makes parameter estimation and…

An estimation method is proposed for a wide variety of discrete time stochastic processes that have an intractable likelihood function but are otherwise conveniently specified by an integral transform such as the characteristic function,…

Stochastic approximation methods play a central role in maximum likelihood estimation problems involving intractable likelihood functions, such as marginal likelihoods arising in problems with missing or incomplete data, and in parametric…

We study proximal random reshuffling for minimizing the sum of locally Lipschitz functions and a proper lower semicontinuous convex function without assuming coercivity or the existence of limit points. The algorithmic guarantees pertaining…

The marginal likelihood is a central tool for drawing Bayesian inference about the number of components in mixture models. It is often approximated since the exact form is unavailable. A bias in the approximation may be due to an incomplete…

Predictive recursion is an accurate and computationally efficient algorithm for nonparametric estimation of mixing densities in mixture models. In semiparametric mixture models, however, the algorithm fails to account for any uncertainty in…

Approximate linear programming (ALP) is an efficient approach to solving large factored Markov decision processes (MDPs). The main idea of the method is to approximate the optimal value function by a set of basis functions and optimize…

The Laplace approximation has been one of the workhorses of Bayesian inference. It often delivers good approximations in practice despite the fact that it does not strictly take into account where the volume of posterior density lies.…

We study a marginal empirical likelihood approach in scenarios when the number of variables grows exponentially with the sample size. The marginal empirical likelihood ratios as functions of the parameters of interest are systematically…

Datasets in the fields of climate and environment are often very large and irregularly spaced. To model such datasets, the widely used Gaussian process models in spatial statis- tics face tremendous challenges due to the prohibitive…

Assuming we have iid observations from two unknown probability density functions (pdfs), $p$ and $q$, the likelihood-ratio estimation (LRE) is an elegant approach to compare the two pdfs only by relying on the available data. In this paper,…

Many statistical models have likelihoods which are intractable: it is impossible or too expensive to compute the likelihood exactly. In such settings, a common approach is to replace the likelihood with an approximation, and proceed with…

In this paper we address the problem of finding the most probable state of a discrete Markov random field (MRF), also known as the MRF energy minimization problem. The task is known to be NP-hard in general and its practical importance…

Many models require integrals of high-dimensional functions: for instance, to obtain marginal likelihoods. Such integrals may be intractable, or too expensive to compute numerically. Instead, we can use the Laplace approximation (LA). The…

We propose a new approach to deriving quantitative mean field approximations for any probability measure $P$ on $\mathbb{R}^n$ with density proportional to $e^{f(x)}$, for $f$ strongly concave. We bound the mean field approximation for the…