Related papers: Markov Chain Importance Sampling -- a highly effic…
In Bayesian statistics, many problems can be expressed as the evaluation of the expectation of a quantity of interest with respect to the posterior distribution. Standard Monte Carlo method is often not applicable because the encountered…
In applications of Gaussian processes where quantification of uncertainty is a strict requirement, it is necessary to accurately characterize the posterior distribution over Gaussian process covariance parameters. Normally, this is done by…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods asymptotically sample from complex probability distributions. The pseudo-marginal MCMC framework only requires an unbiased estimator of the unnormalized probability distribution function to construct…
Bayesian hierarchical modeling is a popular approach to capturing unobserved heterogeneity across individual units. However, standard estimation methods such as Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) can be impracticable for modeling outcomes from…
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).…
The problem of optimally scaling the proposal distribution in a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm is critical to the quality of the generated samples. Much work has gone into obtaining such results for various Metropolis-Hastings (MH)…
The resolution of many large-scale inverse problems using MCMC methods requires a step of drawing samples from a high dimensional Gaussian distribution. While direct Gaussian sampling techniques, such as those based on Cholesky…
We propose a Monte Carlo algorithm to sample from high dimensional probability distributions that combines Markov chain Monte Carlo and importance sampling. We provide a careful theoretical analysis, including guarantees on robustness to…
The naive importance sampling estimator, based on samples from a single importance density, can be numerically unstable. Instead, we consider generalized importance sampling estimators where samples from more than one probability…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are used to estimate features of interest of a distribution. The Monte Carlo error in estimation has an asymptotic normal distribution whose multivariate nature has so far been ignored in the MCMC…
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…
To sample from a given target distribution, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling relies on constructing an ergodic Markov chain with the target distribution as its invariant measure. For any MCMC method, an important question is how to…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a sampling-based method for estimating features of probability distributions. MCMC methods produce a serially correlated, yet representative, sample from the desired distribution. As such it can be…
In sampling tasks, it is common for target distributions to be known up to a normalizing constant. However, in many situations, even evaluating the unnormalized distribution can be costly or infeasible. This issue arises in scenarios such…
We develop a novel Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method that exploits a hierarchy of models of increasing complexity to efficiently generate samples from an unnormalized target distribution. Broadly, the method rewrites the Multilevel…
Monte Carlo methods are essential tools for Bayesian inference. Gibbs sampling is a well-known Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm, extensively used in signal processing, machine learning, and statistics, employed to draw samples from…
Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) is a class of Bayesian inference algorithms that targets for problems with intractable or {unavailable} likelihood function. It uses synthetic data drawn from the simulation model to approximate the…
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…
Stochastic gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms are popular samplers for approximate inference, but they are generally biased. We show that many recent versions of these methods (e.g. Chen et al. (2014)) cannot be corrected using…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are widely used to sample from complicated distributions, especially to sample from the posterior distribution in Bayesian inference. However, MCMC is not directly applicable when facing the doubly…