Related papers: Optimal proposals for Approximate Bayesian Computa…

This paper proposes a novel approach to generate samples from target distributions that are difficult to sample from using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. Traditional MCMC algorithms often face slow convergence due to the…

Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) is computationally intensive for complex model simulators. To exploit expensive simulations, data-resampling via bootstrapping can be employed to obtain many artificial datasets at little cost.…

Practitioners of Bayesian statistics have long depended on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) to obtain samples from intractable posterior distributions. Unfortunately, MCMC algorithms are typically serial, and do not scale to the large…

Bayesian models have become very popular over the last years in several fields such as signal processing, statistics, and machine learning. Bayesian inference requires the approximation of complicated integrals involving posterior…

A central statistical goal is to choose between alternative explanatory models of data. In many modern applications, such as population genetics, it is not possible to apply standard methods based on evaluating the likelihood functions of…

Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) methods are commonly used to approximate posterior distributions in models with unknown or computationally intractable likelihoods. Classical ABC methods are based on nearest neighbor type algorithms…

Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) is a popular method for approximate inference in generative models with intractable but easy-to-sample likelihood. It constructs an approximate posterior distribution by finding parameters for which…

Stochastic approximation Monte Carlo (SAMC) has recently been proposed by Liang, Liu and Carroll [J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 102 (2007) 305--320] as a general simulation and optimization algorithm. In this paper, we propose to improve its…

Appropriately designing the proposal kernel of particle filters is an issue of significant importance, since a bad choice may lead to deterioration of the particle sample and, consequently, waste of computational power. In this paper we…

In statistical data assimilation one seeks the largest maximum of the conditional probability distribution $P(\mathbf{X},\mathbf{p}|\mathbf{Y})$ of model states, $\mathbf{X}$, and parameters,$\mathbf{p}$, conditioned on observations…

The generation of decision-theoretic Bayesian optimal designs is complicated by the significant computational challenge of minimising an analytically intractable expected loss function over a, potentially, high-dimensional design space. A…

We propose a new sampling algorithm combining two quite powerful ideas in the Markov chain Monte Carlo literature -- adaptive Metropolis sampler and two-stage Metropolis-Hastings sampler. The proposed sampling method will be particularly…

A new Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) algorithm for Bayesian updating of model parameters is proposed in this paper, which combines the ABC principles with the technique of Subset Simulation for efficient rare-event simulation, first…

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)…

Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) is a popular sampling method in applications involving intractable likelihood functions. Without evaluating the likelihood function, ABC approximates the posterior distribution by the set of accepted…

Rejection Sampling is a fundamental Monte-Carlo method. It is used to sample from distributions admitting a probability density function which can be evaluated exactly at any given point, albeit at a high computational cost. However,…

In the last decade, sequential Monte-Carlo methods (SMC) emerged as a key tool in computational statistics. These algorithms approximate a sequence of distributions by a sequence of weighted empirical measures associated to a weighted…

Exact approximations of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are a general emerging class of sampling algorithms. One of the main ideas behind exact approximations consists of replacing intractable quantities required to run standard…

In Bayesian inverse problems, one aims at characterizing the posterior distribution of a set of unknowns, given indirect measurements. For non-linear/non-Gaussian problems, analytic solutions are seldom available: Sequential Monte Carlo…

We propose nested sequential Monte Carlo (NSMC), a methodology to sample from sequences of probability distributions, even where the random variables are high-dimensional. NSMC generalises the SMC framework by requiring only approximate,…