Related papers: Markov Chain Importance Sampling -- a highly effic…
Despite having various attractive qualities such as high prediction accuracy and the ability to quantify uncertainty and avoid over-fitting, Bayesian Matrix Factorization has not been widely adopted because of the prohibitive cost of…
Posterior sampling is a task of central importance in Bayesian inference. For many applications in Bayesian meta-analysis and Bayesian transfer learning, the prior distribution is unknown and needs to be estimated from samples. In practice,…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are simple and extremely powerful techniques to sample from almost arbitrary distributions. The flaw in practice is that it can take a large and/or unknown amount of time to converge to the…
As sample sizes grow, scalability has become a central concern in the development of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. One general approach to this problem, exemplified by the popular stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD)…
In recent decades, a number of profound theorems concerning approximation of hard counting problems have appeared. These include estimation of the permanent, estimating the volume of a convex polyhedron, and counting (approximately) the…
Evaluating the degree of partisan districting (Gerrymandering) in a statistical framework typically requires an ensemble of districting plans which are drawn from a prescribed probability distribution that adheres to a realistic and…
Variable selection is a key issue when analyzing high-dimensional data. The explosion of data with large sample sizes and dimensionality brings new challenges to this problem in both inference accuracy and computational complexity. To…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) has transformed Bayesian model inference over the past three decades: mainly because of this, Bayesian inference is now a workhorse of applied scientists. Under general conditions, MCMC sampling converges…
The Pseudo-Marginal (PM) algorithm is a popular Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method used to sample from a target distribution when its density is inaccessible, but can be estimated with a non-negative unbiased estimator. Its performance…
Accept-reject based Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms have traditionally utilised acceptance probabilities that can be explicitly written as a function of the ratio of the target density at the two contested points. This feature is…
Estimating Monte Carlo error is critical to valid simulation results in Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and initial sequence estimators were one of the first methods introduced for this. Over the last few years, focus has been on…
We propose quantum algorithms that provide provable speedups for Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods commonly used for sampling from probability distributions of the form $\pi \propto e^{-f}$, where $f$ is a potential function. Our…
Decision trees are flexible models that are well suited for many statistical regression problems. In a Bayesian framework for regression trees, Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) search algorithms are required to generate samples of tree…
We present an algorithm that can efficiently compute a broad class of inferences for discrete-time imprecise Markov chains, a generalised type of Markov chains that allows one to take into account partially specified probabilities and other…
Piecewise deterministic Markov processes (PDMPs) can be used to model complex dynamical industrial systems. The counterpart of this modeling capability is their simulation cost, which makes reliability assessment untractable with standard…
The Bayesian estimation of the unknown parameters of state-space (dynamical) systems has received considerable attention over the past decade, with a handful of powerful algorithms being introduced. In this paper we tackle the theoretical…
This paper proposes niching importance sampling, a framework that combines concepts from reliability analysis, e.g. Markov chains, importance sampling, and relative cross entropy minimisation, with niching techniques from evolutionary…
In recent years, methods for Bayesian inference have been widely used in many different problems in physics where detection and characterization are necessary. Data analysis in gravitational-wave astronomy is a prime example of such a case.…
A novel adaptive Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm is presented. The algorithm utilizes sparsity in the partial correlation structure of a density to efficiently estimate the covariance matrix through the Cholesky factor of the precision…
Adaptive importance sampling (AIS) methods provide a useful alternative to Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms for performing inference of intractable distributions. Population Monte Carlo (PMC) algorithms constitute a family of AIS…