Related papers: Likelihood-free MCMC with Amortized Approximate Ra…
In many modern applications, difficulty in evaluating the posterior density makes performing even a single MCMC step slow. This difficulty can be caused by intractable likelihood functions, but also appears for routine problems with large…
Bayesian inference for doubly-intractable pairwise exponential graphical models typically involves variations of the exchange algorithm or approximate Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) samplers. However, existing methods for both classes of…
Methods that bypass analytical evaluations of the likelihood function have become an indispensable tool for statistical inference in many fields of science. These so-called likelihood-free methods rely on accepting and rejecting simulations…
We propose sequential Monte Carlo based algorithms for maximum likelihood estimation of the static parameters in hidden Markov models with an intractable likelihood using ideas from approximate Bayesian computation. The static parameter…
In many complex statistical models maximum likelihood estimators cannot be calculated. In the paper we solve this problem using Markov chain Monte Carlo approximation of the true likelihood. In the main result we prove asymptotic normality…
There is a growing interest in studying sequential neural posterior estimation (SNPE) techniques due to their advantages for simulation-based models with intractable likelihoods. The methods aim to learn the posterior from adaptively…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are routinely used to draw samples from distributions with intractable normalization constants. However, standard MCMC algorithms do not apply to doubly-intractable distributions in which there are…
Bayesian inference in the presence of an intractable likelihood function is computationally challenging. When following a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach to approximate the posterior distribution in this context, one typically…
Likelihood-free methods are an essential tool for performing inference for implicit models which can be simulated from, but for which the corresponding likelihood is intractable. However, common likelihood-free methods do not scale well to…
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…
Bayesian inference for Continuous-Time Markov Chains (CTMCs) on countably infinite spaces is notoriously difficult because evaluating the likelihood exactly is intractable. One way to address this challenge is to first build a non-negative…
In this paper, we introduce a new form of amortized variational inference by using the forward KL divergence in a joint-contrastive variational loss. The resulting forward amortized variational inference is a likelihood-free method as its…
Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) can be viewed as an analytic approximation of an intractable likelihood coupled with an elementary simulation step. Such a view, combined with a suitable instrumental prior distribution permits…
We introduce a new algorithm for approximate inference that combines reparametrization, Markov chain Monte Carlo and variational methods. We construct a very flexible implicit variational distribution synthesized by an arbitrary Markov…
Applying standard statistical methods after model selection may yield inefficient estimators and hypothesis tests that fail to achieve nominal type-I error rates. The main issue is the fact that the post-selection distribution of the data…
We propose Subsampling MCMC, a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) framework where the likelihood function for $n$ observations is estimated from a random subset of $m$ observations. We introduce a highly efficient unbiased estimator of the…
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…
We propose a generic Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm to speed up computations for datasets with many observations. A key feature of our approach is the use of the highly efficient difference estimator from the survey sampling…
Empirical economic research frequently applies maximum likelihood estimation in cases where the likelihood function is analytically intractable. Most of the theoretical literature focuses on maximum simulated likelihood (MSL) estimators,…
We present an original simulation-based method to estimate likelihood ratios efficiently for general state-space models. Our method relies on a novel use of the conditional Sequential Monte Carlo (cSMC) algorithm introduced in…