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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…
For big data analysis, high computational cost for Bayesian methods often limits their applications in practice. In recent years, there have been many attempts to improve computational efficiency of Bayesian inference. Here we propose an…
Bayesian inference using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) on large datasets has developed rapidly in recent years. However, the underlying methods are generally limited to relatively simple settings where the data have specific forms of…
Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are popular likelihood-based generative models which can be efficiently trained by maximizing an Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO). There has been much progress in improving the expressiveness of the variational…
Bayesian hierarchical linear models provide a natural framework to analyze nested and clustered data. Classical estimation with Markov chain Monte Carlo produces well calibrated posterior distributions but becomes computationally expensive…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods sample from unnormalized probability distributions and offer guarantees of exact sampling. However, in the continuous case, unfavorable geometry of the target distribution can greatly limit the…
Bayesian modelling and computational inference by Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a principled framework for large-scale uncertainty quantification, though is limited in practice by computational cost when implemented in the simplest…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling methods are widely used but often encounter either slow convergence or biased sampling when applied to multimodal high dimensional distributions. In this paper, we present a general framework of…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a state-of-the-art Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling algorithm for drawing samples from smooth probability densities over continuous spaces. We study the variant most widely used in practice, Metropolized…
Bayesian inference allows us to define a posterior distribution over the weights of a generic neural network (NN). Exact posteriors are usually intractable, in which case approximations can be employed. One such approximation - variational…
The Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) sampling algorithm exploits Hamiltonian dynamics to construct efficient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), which has become increasingly popular in machine learning and statistics. Since HMC uses the gradient…
Deriving Bayesian inference for exponential random graph models (ERGMs) is a challenging "doubly intractable" problem as the normalizing constants of the likelihood and posterior density are both intractable. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)…
In this paper we propose to evaluate and compare Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods to estimate the parameters in a generalized extreme value model. We employed the Bayesian approach using traditional Metropolis-Hastings methods,…
In lattice quantum field theory studies, parameters defining the lattice theory must be tuned toward criticality to access continuum physics. Commonly used Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods suffer from critical slowing down in this…
Autocorrelations in MCMC chains increase the variance of the estimators they produce. We propose the occlusion process to mitigate this problem. It is a process that sits upon an existing MCMC sampler, and occasionally replaces its samples…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a powerful Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm for estimating expectations with respect to continuous un-normalized probability distributions. MCMC estimators typically have higher variance than…
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,…
Modern variational inference (VI) uses stochastic gradients to avoid intractable expectations, enabling large-scale probabilistic inference in complex models. VI posits a family of approximating distributions q and then finds the member of…
Variational inference is a fast and scalable alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo and has been widely applied to posterior inference tasks in statistics and machine learning. A traditional approach for implementing mean-field variational…
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…