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Bayesian inference for models that have an intractable partition function is known as a doubly intractable problem, where standard Monte Carlo methods are not applicable. The past decade has seen the development of auxiliary variable Monte…

Computation · Statistics 2017-10-13 Richard G. Everitt , Dennis Prangle , Philip Maybank , Mark Bell

This paper deals with Gibbs samplers that include high dimensional conditional Gaussian distributions. It proposes an efficient algorithm that avoids the high dimensional Gaussian sampling and relies on a random excursion along a small set…

Computation · Statistics 2016-04-20 Olivier Féron , François Orieux , Jean-François Giovannelli

Sampling from discrete distributions is a ubiquitous task in machine learning, recently revisited by the emergence of discrete diffusion models. While Langevin algorithms constitute the state of the art for continuous spaces, discrete…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-02-18 Armand Gissler , Saeed Saremi , Francis Bach

Gibbs sampling is a common procedure used to fit finite mixture models. However, it is known to be slow to converge when exploring correlated regions of a parameter space and so blocking correlated parameters is sometimes implemented in…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-11-04 David Michael Swanson

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are widely used in machine learning. One of the major problems with MCMC is the question of how to design chains that mix fast over the whole state space; in particular, how to select the parameters…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-16 Kiarash Shaloudegi , András György

Learning to sample from complex unnormalized distributions over discrete domains emerged as a promising research direction with applications in statistical physics, variational inference, and combinatorial optimization. Recent work has…

In recent years, the shortcomings of Bayesian posteriors as inferential devices have received increased attention. A popular strategy for fixing them has been to instead target a Gibbs measure based on losses that connect a parameter of…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-04-24 David T. Frazier , Jeremias Knoblauch , Jack Jewson , Christopher Drovandi

Recent work has suggested using Monte Carlo methods based on piecewise deterministic Markov processes (PDMPs) to sample from target distributions of interest. PDMPs are non-reversible continuous-time processes endowed with momentum, and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-28 Paul Fearnhead , Sebastiano Grazzi , Chris Nemeth , Gareth O. Roberts

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods such as Gibbs sampling are finding widespread use in applied statistics and machine learning. These often lead to difficult computational problems, which are increasingly being solved on parallel and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-06-05 Alexander Terenin , Eric P. Xing

We present a Dirichlet process mixture model over discrete incomplete rankings and study two Gibbs sampling inference techniques for estimating posterior clusterings. The first approach uses a slice sampling subcomponent for estimating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-03-19 Marina Meila , Harr Chen

We study the problem of posterior sampling in discrete-state spaces using discrete diffusion models. While posterior sampling methods for continuous diffusion models have achieved remarkable progress, analogous methods for discrete…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Wenda Chu , Zihui Wu , Yifan Chen , Yang Song , Yisong Yue

We present here two irreversible Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms for general discrete state systems, one of the algorithms is based on the random-scan Gibbs sampler for discrete states and the other on its improved version, the…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2020-05-08 Fahim Faizi , George Deligiannidis , Edina Rosta

A number of algorithms have been developed to solve probabilistic inference problems on belief networks. These algorithms can be divided into two main groups: exact techniques which exploit the conditional independence revealed when the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-04-08 Ross D. Shachter , Mark Alan Peot

Markov chain Monte Carlo methods are often deemed too computationally intensive to be of any practical use for big data applications, and in particular for inference on datasets containing a large number $n$ of individual data points, also…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-05-13 Rémi Bardenet , Arnaud Doucet , Chris Holmes

Gibbs sampling is the de facto Markov chain Monte Carlo method used for inference and learning on large scale graphical models. For complicated factor graphs with lots of factors, the performance of Gibbs sampling can be limited by the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-19 Christopher De Sa , Vincent Chen , Wing Wong

Discrete Markov random fields are undirected graphical models that capture complex conditional dependencies between discrete variables. Conducting exact posterior inference in these models is often computationally challenging because…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-10 Giuseppe Arena , Maarten Marsman

Variational inference approximates the posterior distribution of a probabilistic model with a parameterized density by maximizing a lower bound for the model evidence. Modern solutions fit a flexible approximation with stochastic gradient…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-07-13 Joseph Sakaya , Arto Klami

Finite mixture models are frequently used to uncover latent structures in high-dimensional datasets (e.g.\ identifying clusters of patients in electronic health records). The inference of such structures can be performed in a Bayesian…

We study the convergence properties of the Gibbs Sampler in the context of posterior distributions arising from Bayesian analysis of conditionally Gaussian hierarchical models. We develop a multigrid approach to derive analytic expressions…

Computation · Statistics 2019-06-27 Giacomo Zanella , Gareth Roberts

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are often used for approximate inference inside learning, but their slow mixing can be difficult to diagnose and the approximations can seriously degrade learning. To alleviate these issues, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-02-25 Jacob Steinhardt , Percy Liang