Related papers: Adaptive Monte Carlo Multiple Testing via Multi-Ar…
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…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods to sample from a probability distribution $\pi$ defined on a space $(\Theta,\mathcal{T})$ consist of the simulation of realisations of Markov chains $\{\theta_{n},n\geq1\}$ of invariant distribution…
We consider conditional tests for non-negative discrete exponential families. We develop two Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms which allow us to sample from the conditional space and to perform approximated tests. The first…
For many complex simulation tasks spanning areas such as healthcare, engineering, and finance, Monte Carlo (MC) methods are invaluable due to their unbiased estimates and precise error quantification. Nevertheless, Monte Carlo simulations…
UCT, a state-of-the art algorithm for Monte Carlo tree sampling (MCTS), is based on UCB, a sampling policy for the Multi-armed Bandit Problem (MAB) that minimizes the accumulated regret. However, MCTS differs from MAB in that only the final…
Software packages usually report the results of statistical tests using p-values. Users often interpret these by comparing them to standard thresholds, e.g. 0.1%, 1% and 5%, which is sometimes reinforced by a star rating (***, **, *). We…
Among Monte Carlo techniques, the importance sampling requires fine tuning of a proposal distribution, which is now fluently resolved through iterative schemes. The Adaptive Multiple Importance Sampling (AMIS) of Cornuet et al. (2012)…
Scientific experimentation is largely driven by statistical hypothesis testing to determine significant differences in interventions. Traditionally, experimenters allocate samples uniformly between each intervention. However, such an…
Hypothesis tests calibrated by (re)sampling methods (such as permutation, rank and bootstrap tests) are useful tools for statistical analysis, at the computational cost of requiring Monte-Carlo sampling for calibration. It is common and…
This paper focuses on variational inference with intractable likelihood functions that can be unbiasedly estimated. A flexible variational approximation based on Gaussian mixtures is developed, by adopting the mixture population Monte Carlo…
The Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are popular when considering sampling from a high-dimensional random variable $\mathbf{x}$ with possibly unnormalised probability density $p$ and observed data $\mathbf{d}$. However, MCMC requires…
Model comparison for the purposes of selection, averaging and validation is a problem found throughout statistics. Within the Bayesian paradigm, these problems all require the calculation of the posterior probabilities of models within a…
We consider the problem of multiple hypothesis testing with generic side information: for each hypothesis $H_i$ we observe both a p-value $p_i$ and some predictor $x_i$ encoding contextual information about the hypothesis. For large-scale…
Methods of approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) are increasingly used for analysis of complex models. A major challenge for ABC is over-coming the often inherent problem of high rejection rates in the accept/reject methods based on…
Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) methods are increasingly used for inference in situations in which the likelihood function is either computationally costly or intractable to evaluate. Extensions of the basic ABC rejection algorithm…
Stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (SGMCMC) is a popular class of algorithms for scalable Bayesian inference. However, these algorithms include hyperparameters such as step size or batch size that influence the accuracy of…
Thompson sampling for multi-armed bandit problems is known to enjoy favorable performance in both theory and practice. However, it suffers from a significant limitation computationally, arising from the need for samples from posterior…
Multi-fidelity Monte Carlo (MFMC) is a variance reduction method that leverages a multi-fidelity ensemble of models of varying cost and accuracy levels. Constructing an MFMC estimator with optimal variance requires knowledge of the…
We are concerned with a situation in which we would like to test multiple hypotheses with tests whose p-values cannot be computed explicitly but can be approximated using Monte Carlo simulation. This scenario occurs widely in practice. We…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a popular Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm to sample from an unnormalized probability distribution. A leapfrog integrator is commonly used to implement HMC in practice, but its performance can be…