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Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and Belief Propagation (BP) are the most popular algorithms for computational inference in Graphical Models (GM). In principle, MCMC is an exact probabilistic method which, however, often suffers from…

Variational inference has recently emerged as a popular alternative to the classical Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) in large-scale Bayesian inference. The core idea is to trade statistical accuracy for computational efficiency. In this…

Efficiently accessing the information contained in non-linear and high dimensional probability distributions remains a core challenge in modern statistics. Traditionally, estimators that go beyond point estimates are either categorized as…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is the predominant tool used in Bayesian parameter estimation for hierarchical models. When the model expands due to an increasing number of hierarchical levels, number of groups at a particular level, or…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), Laplace approximation (LA) and variational inference (VI) methods are popular approaches to Bayesian inference, each with trade-offs between computational cost and accuracy. However, a theoretical…

Variational inference (VI) is widely used as an efficient alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo. It posits a family of approximating distributions $q$ and finds the closest member to the exact posterior $p$. Closeness is usually measured…

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…

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 phylogenetic inference is currently done via Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) with simple proposal mechanisms. This hinders exploration efficiency and often requires long runs to deliver accurate posterior estimates. In this paper,…

Sampling from posterior distributions using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods can require an exhaustive number of iterations, particularly when the posterior is multi-modal as the MCMC sampler can become trapped in a local mode for a…

Adaptive and interacting Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms (MCMC) have been recently introduced in the literature. These novel simulation algorithms are designed to increase the simulation efficiency to sample complex distributions.…

Variational inference algorithms have proven successful for Bayesian analysis in large data settings, with recent advances using stochastic variational inference (SVI). However, such methods have largely been studied in independent or…

This book aims to provide a graduate-level introduction to advanced topics in Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms, as applied broadly in the Bayesian computational context. Most, if not all of these topics (stochastic gradient MCMC,…

When dealing with datasets containing a billion instances or with simulations that require a supercomputer to execute, computational resources become part of the equation. We can improve the efficiency of learning and inference by…

We study the computational complexity of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods for high-dimensional Bayesian linear regression under sparsity constraints. We first show that a Bayesian approach can achieve variable-selection consistency…

Variational Bayes (VB) is a popular tool for Bayesian inference in statistical modeling. Recently, some VB algorithms are proposed to handle intractable likelihoods with applications such as approximate Bayesian computation. In this paper,…

Bayesian parameter inference for complex stochastic simulators is challenging due to intractable likelihood functions. Existing simulation-based inference methods often require large number of simulations and become costly to use in…

We present an original simulation-based method to estimate likelihood ratios efficiently for general state-space models. Our method relies on a novel use of the conditional Sequential Monte Carlo (cSMC) algorithm introduced in…

A fundamental challenge in Bayesian inference is efficient representation of a target distribution. Many non-parametric approaches do so by sampling a large number of points using variants of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). We propose an…

In this paper, we propose a variance reduction approach for Markov chains based on additive control variates and the minimization of an appropriate estimate for the asymptotic variance. We focus on the particular case when control variates…