Related papers: A unified perspective on modified Poisson likeliho…
Parameter estimation in HEP experiments often involves Monte-Carlo simulation to model the experimental response function. A typical application are forward-folding likelihood analyses with re-weighting, or time-consuming minimization…
Metrics of model goodness-of-fit, model comparison, and model parameter estimation are the main categories of statistical problems in science. Bayesian and frequentist methods that address these questions often rely on a likelihood…
The main focus of the analysts who deal with clustered data is usually not on the clustering variables, and hence the group-specific parameters are treated as nuisance. If a fixed effects formulation is preferred and the total number of…
We investigate the Monte Carlo approach to propagation of experimental uncertainties within the context of the established "MSTW 2008" global analysis of parton distribution functions (PDFs) of the proton at next-to-leading order in the…
Simulating samples from arbitrary probability distributions is a major research program of statistical computing. Recent work has shown promise in an old idea, that sampling from a discrete distribution can be accomplished by perturbing and…
The objective of Bayesian inference is often to infer, from data, a probability measure for a random variable that can be used as input for Monte Carlo simulation. When datasets for Bayesian inference are small, a principle challenge is…
Composite likelihood inference has gained much popularity thanks to its computational manageability and its theoretical properties. Unfortunately, performing composite likelihood ratio tests is inconvenient because of their awkward…
In a Cox model, the partial likelihood, as the product of a series of conditional probabilities, is used to estimate the regression coefficients. In practice, those conditional probabilities are approximated by risk score ratios based on a…
A composite likelihood is an inference function derived by multiplying a set of likelihood components. This approach provides a flexible framework for drawing inference when the likelihood function of a statistical model is computationally…
Compound Poisson distributions have been employed by many authors to fit experimental data, typically via the method of moments or maximum likelihood estimation. We propose a new technique and apply it to several sets of published data. It…
This paper is devoted to the multivariate estimation of a vector of Poisson means. A novel loss function that penalises bad estimates of each of the parameters and the sum (or equivalently the mean) of the parameters is introduced. Under…
The Poisson log-normal model is a latent variable model that provides a generic framework for the analysis of multivariate count data. Inferring its parameters can be a daunting task since the conditional distribution of the latent…
The statistics of the sum of random weights where the number of weights is Poisson distributed has important applications in nuclear physics, particle physics and astrophysics. Events are frequently weighted according to their acceptance or…
A composite likelihood is a non-genuine likelihood function that allows to make inference on limited aspects of a model, such as marginal or conditional distributions. Composite likelihoods are not proper likelihoods and need therefore…
Many statistical models can be simulated forwards but have intractable likelihoods. Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) methods are used to infer properties of these models from data. Traditionally these methods approximate the posterior…
Models for which the likelihood function can be evaluated only up to a parameter-dependent unknown normalising constant, such as Markov random field models, are used widely in computer science, statistical physics, spatial statistics, and…
The negative binomial distribution has been widely used as a more flexible model than the Poisson distribution for count data. However, when the true data-generating process is Poisson, it is often challenging to distinguish it from a…
Random-effects models are central to meta-analysis, yet the between-study variance is often underestimated when the number of studies is small. In such settings, confidence intervals become unduly narrow and fail to attain the nominal…
Monte Carlo methods are widely used for approximating complicated, multidimensional integrals for Bayesian inference. Population Monte Carlo (PMC) is an important class of Monte Carlo methods, which utilizes a population of proposals to…
Population Monte Carlo (PMC) sampling methods are powerful tools for approximating distributions of static unknowns given a set of observations. These methods are iterative in nature: at each step they generate samples from a proposal…