Related papers: Approximate Collapsed Gibbs Clustering with Expect…

Approximate Bayesian computation methods are useful for generative models with intractable likelihoods. These methods are however sensitive to the dimension of the parameter space, requiring exponentially increasing resources as this…

Performing exact Bayesian inference for complex models is computationally intractable. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms can provide reliable approximations of the posterior distribution but are expensive for large datasets and…

In this paper, we investigate combining blocking and collapsing -- two widely used strategies for improving the accuracy of Gibbs sampling -- in the context of probabilistic graphical models (PGMs). We show that combining them is not…

Effective implementations of sampling-based probabilistic inference often require manually constructed, model-specific proposals. Inspired by recent progresses in meta-learning for training learning agents that can generalize to unseen…

The Partially Collapsed Gibbs (PCG) sampler offers a new strategy for improving the convergence of a Gibbs sampler. PCG achieves faster convergence by reducing the conditioning in some of the draws of its parent Gibbs sampler. Although this…

Bayesian feature allocation models are a popular tool for modelling data with a combinatorial latent structure. Exact inference in these models is generally intractable and so practitioners typically apply Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)…

Denoising diffusion models have driven significant progress in the field of Bayesian inverse problems. Recent approaches use pre-trained diffusion models as priors to solve a wide range of such problems, only leveraging inference-time…

We propose a novel approximate inference algorithm that approximates a target distribution by amortising the dynamics of a user-selected MCMC sampler. The idea is to initialise MCMC using samples from an approximation network, apply the…

This paper presents a new Markov chain Monte Carlo method to sample from the posterior distribution of conjugate mixture models. This algorithm relies on a flexible split-merge procedure built using the particle Gibbs sampler. Contrary to…

The Hidden Markov Model (HMM) is a widely-used statistical model for handling sequential data. However, the presence of missing observations in real-world datasets often complicates the application of the model. The EM algorithm and Gibbs…

This paper introduces a concept of approximate spectral gap to analyze the mixing time of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms for which the usual spectral gap is degenerate or almost degenerate. We use the idea to analyze a class of…

A central task in many applications is reasoning about processes that change over continuous time. Continuous-Time Bayesian Networks is a general compact representation language for multi-component continuous-time processes. However, exact…

We show that evolutionary computation can be implemented as standard Markov-chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC) sampling. With some care, `genetic algorithms' can be constructed that are reversible Markov chains that satisfy detailed balance; it…

We develop a new Gibbs sampler for a linear mixed model with a Dirichlet process random effect term, which is easily extended to a generalized linear mixed model with a probit link function. Our Gibbs sampler exploits the properties of the…

The Gibbs sampler (GS) is a crucial algorithm for approximating complex calculations, and it is justified by Markov chain theory, the alternating projection theorem, and $I$-projection, separately. We explore the equivalence between these…

Many methods for machine learning rely on approximate inference from intractable probability distributions. Variational inference approximates such distributions by tractable models that can be subsequently used for approximate inference.…

The latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) model is a widely-used latent variable model in machine learning for text analysis. Inference for this model typically involves a single-site collapsed Gibbs sampling step for latent variables…

Solving ill-posed inverse problems by Bayesian inference has recently attracted considerable attention. Compared to deterministic approaches, the probabilistic representation of the solution by the posterior distribution can be exploited to…

We consider various versions of adaptive Gibbs and Metropolis within-Gibbs samplers, which update their selection probabilities (and perhaps also their proposal distributions) on the fly during a run, by learning as they go in an attempt to…

The inadequate mixing of conventional Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods for multi-modal distributions presents a significant challenge in practical applications such as Bayesian inference and molecular dynamics. Addressing this, we…