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We consider adaptive increasingly rare Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms, which are adaptive MCMC methods, where the adaptation concerning the "past'' happens less and less frequently over time. Under a contraction assumption with…
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)…
Replica exchange Monte Carlo (reMC), also known as parallel tempering, is an important technique for accelerating the convergence of the conventional Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. However, such a method requires the evaluation…
Computing the marginal likelihood or evidence is one of the core challenges in Bayesian analysis. While there are many established methods for estimating this quantity, they predominantly rely on using a large number of posterior samples…
Bayesian inference with Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is challenging when the likelihood function is irregular and expensive to compute. We explore several sampling algorithms that make use of subset evaluations to reduce computational…
Bayesian inference for Markov processes has become increasingly relevant in recent years. Problems of this type often have intractable likelihoods and prior knowledge about model rate parameters is often poor. Markov Chain Monte Carlo…
Network reconstruction is the task of inferring the unseen interactions between elements of a system, based only on their behavior or dynamics. This inverse problem is in general ill-posed, and admits many solutions for the same…
Standard MCMC methods can scale poorly to big data settings due to the need to evaluate the likelihood at each iteration. There have been a number of approximate MCMC algorithms that use sub-sampling ideas to reduce this computational…
Estimating failure probabilities of engineering systems is an important problem in many engineering fields. In this work we consider such problems where the failure probability is extremely small (e.g $\leq10^{-10}$). In this case, standard…
Irreversible and rejection-free Monte Carlo methods, recently developed in Physics under the name Event-Chain and known in Statistics as Piecewise Deterministic Monte Carlo (PDMC), have proven to produce clear acceleration over standard…
Markov chain Monte Carlo is an inherently serial algorithm. Although likelihood calculations for individual steps can sometimes be parallelized, the serial evolution of the process is widely viewed as incompatible with parallelization,…
We introduce a gradient-based learning method to automatically adapt Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) proposal distributions to intractable targets. We define a maximum entropy regularised objective function, referred to as generalised speed…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are generally regarded as the gold standard technique for Bayesian inference. They are theoretically well-understood and conceptually simple to apply in practice. The drawback of MCMC is that in…
Many problems of practical interest rely on Continuous-time Markov chains~(CTMCs) defined over combinatorial state spaces, rendering the computation of transition probabilities, and hence probabilistic inference, difficult or impossible…
We present a new Bayesian inference method for compartmental models that takes into account the intrinsic stochasticity of the process. We show how to formulate a SIR-type Markov jump process as the solution of a stochastic differential…
Inference after model selection presents computational challenges when dealing with intractable conditional distributions. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a common method for sampling from these distributions, but its slow convergence…
The Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm is a widely recognised as an efficient method for sampling a specified posterior distribution. However, when the posterior is multi-modal, conventional MCMC algorithms either tend to become…
Strongly Rayleigh distributions are natural generalizations of product and determinantal probability distributions and satisfy strongest form of negative dependence properties. We show that the "natural" Monte Carlo Markov Chain (MCMC) is…
It was known from Metropolis et al. [J. Chem. Phys. 21 (1953) 1087--1092] that one can sample from a distribution by performing Monte Carlo simulation from a Markov chain whose equilibrium distribution is equal to the target distribution.…
We propose quantum algorithms that provide provable speedups for Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods commonly used for sampling from probability distributions of the form $\pi \propto e^{-f}$, where $f$ is a potential function. Our…