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This paper concerns the use of Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for posterior sampling in Bayesian nonparametric mixture models with normalized random measure priors. Making use of some recent posterior characterizations for the class of…

Methodology · Statistics 2013-10-03 Stefano Favaro , Yee Whye Teh

Posterior sampling by Monte Carlo methods provides a more comprehensive solution approach to inverse problems than computing point estimates such as the maximum posterior using optimization methods, at the expense of usually requiring many…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2024-11-28 Paolo Villani , Daniel Andrés-Arcones , Jörg F. Unger , Martin Weiser

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms have become powerful tools for Bayesian inference. However, they do not scale well to large-data problems. Divide-and-conquer strategies, which split the data into batches and, for each batch, run…

Computation · Statistics 2017-07-18 Christopher Nemeth , Chris Sherlock

Bayesian computation crucially relies on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. In the case of massive data sets, running the Metropolis-Hastings sampler to draw from the posterior distribution becomes prohibitive due to the large…

Computation · Statistics 2015-12-07 Roberto Casarin , Radu V. Craiu , Fabrizio Leisen

A key quantity of interest in Bayesian inference are expectations of functions with respect to a posterior distribution. Markov Chain Monte Carlo is a fundamental tool to consistently compute these expectations via averaging samples drawn…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-02-10 Heiko Strathmann , Dino Sejdinovic , Mark Girolami

Posterior sampling is a task of central importance in Bayesian inference. For many applications in Bayesian meta-analysis and Bayesian transfer learning, the prior distribution is unknown and needs to be estimated from samples. In practice,…

Computation · Statistics 2024-08-06 Chenyang Zhong , Shouxuan Ji , Tian Zheng

Sampling from the posterior is a key technical problem in Bayesian statistics. Rigorous guarantees are difficult to obtain for Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms of common use. In this paper, we study an alternative class of algorithms…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-08-26 Andrea Montanari , Yuchen Wu

Bayesian causal discovery aims to infer the posterior distribution over causal models from observed data, quantifying epistemic uncertainty and benefiting downstream tasks. However, computational challenges arise due to joint inference over…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-11 Yashas Annadani , Nick Pawlowski , Joel Jennings , Stefan Bauer , Cheng Zhang , Wenbo Gong

Bayesian inference allows us to define a posterior distribution over the weights of a generic neural network (NN). Exact posteriors are usually intractable, in which case approximations can be employed. One such approximation - variational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Andrew Millard , Joshua Murphy , Peter Green , Simon Maskell

We propose a novel approach to perform approximate Bayesian inference in complex models such as Bayesian neural networks. The approach is more scalable to large data than Markov Chain Monte Carlo, it embraces more expressive models than…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-09-07 Joel Janek Dabrowski , Daniel Edward Pagendam

We propose a general method to carry out a valid Bayesian analysis of a finite-dimensional `targeted' parameter in the presence of a finite-dimensional nuisance parameter. We apply our methods to causal inference based on estimating…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-03 Magid Sabbagh , David A. Stephens

Bayesian methods for learning Gaussian graphical models offer a principled framework for quantifying model uncertainty and incorporating prior knowledge. However, their scalability is constrained by the computational cost of jointly…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-08-28 Reza Mohammadi , Marit Schoonhoven , Lucas Vogels , S. Ilker Birbil

Sampling from posterior distributions using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods can require an exhaustive number of iterations, particularly when the posterior is multi-modal as the MCMC sampler can become trapped in a local mode for a…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-10-30 Christopher Nemeth , Fredrik Lindsten , Maurizio Filippone , James Hensman

Many inference problems involve inferring the number $N$ of components in some region, along with their properties $\{\mathbf{x}_i\}_{i=1}^N$, from a dataset $\mathcal{D}$. A common statistical example is finite mixture modelling. In the…

Computation · Statistics 2015-01-15 Brendon J. Brewer

Simulator-based models are models for which the likelihood is intractable but simulation of synthetic data is possible. They are often used to describe complex real-world phenomena, and as such can often be misspecified in practice.…

The indeterminate nature of human motion requires trajectory prediction systems to use a probabilistic model to formulate the multi-modality phenomenon and infer a finite set of future trajectories. However, the inference processes of most…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-04-11 Guangyi Chen , Zhenhao Chen , Shunxing Fan , Kun Zhang

For a Bayesian, real-time forecasting with the posterior predictive distribution can be challenging for a variety of time series models. First, estimating the parameters of a time series model can be difficult with sample-based approaches…

Applications · Statistics 2022-08-08 Taylor R. Brown

Integration over non-negative integrands is a central problem in machine learning (e.g. for model averaging, (hyper-)parameter marginalisation, and computing posterior predictive distributions). Bayesian Quadrature is a probabilistic…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-12-05 Ed Wagstaff , Saad Hamid , Michael Osborne

We propose a Bayesian nonparametric mixture model for the reconstruction and prediction from observed time series data, of discretized stochastic dynamical systems, based on Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods (MCMC). Our results can be used…

Applications · Statistics 2017-10-03 Christos Merkatas , Konstantinos Kaloudis , Spyridon J. Hatjispyros

For a Bayesian, the task to define the likelihood can be as perplexing as the task to define the prior. We focus on situations when the parameter of interest has been emancipated from the likelihood and is linked to data directly through a…

Computation · Statistics 2022-06-01 Lizhen Nie , Veronika Rockova