Related papers: A Multi-armed Bandit MCMC, with applications in sa…

Multi-armed Bandit (MAB) algorithms identify the best arm among multiple arms via exploration-exploitation trade-off without prior knowledge of arm statistics. Their usefulness in wireless radio, IoT, and robotics demand deployment on edge…

It is commonly admitted that non-reversible Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms usually yield more accurate MCMC estimators than their reversible counterparts. In this note, we show that in addition to their variance reduction…

The multi-armed bandit(MAB) is a classical sequential decision problem. Most work requires assumptions about the reward distribution (e.g., bounded), while practitioners may have difficulty obtaining information about these distributions to…

Constructing unbiased estimators from Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) outputs is a difficult problem that has recently received a lot of attention in the statistics and machine learning communities. However, the current unbiased MCMC…

Variational inference lies at the core of many state-of-the-art algorithms. To improve the approximation of the posterior beyond parametric families, it was proposed to include MCMC steps into the variational lower bound. In this work we…

In Bayesian statistics, many problems can be expressed as the evaluation of the expectation of a quantity of interest with respect to the posterior distribution. Standard Monte Carlo method is often not applicable because the encountered…

There is a lack of simple and scalable algorithms for uncertainty quantification. Bayesian methods quantify uncertainty through posterior and predictive distributions, but it is difficult to rapidly estimate summaries of these…

As it has become common to use many computer cores in routine applications, finding good ways to parallelize popular algorithms has become increasingly important. In this paper, we present a parallelization scheme for Markov chain Monte…

Sparsity has become a key concept for solving of high-dimensional inverse problems using variational regularization techniques. Recently, using similar sparsity-constraints in the Bayesian framework for inverse problems by encoding them in…

Estimating model parameters of a general family of cure models is always a challenging task mainly due to flatness and multimodality of the likelihood function. In this work, we propose a fully Bayesian approach in order to overcome these…

It is widely known that the performance of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) can degrade quickly when targeting computationally expensive posterior distributions, such as when the sample size is large. This has motivated the search for MCMC…

There is increasing interest to develop Bayesian inferential algorithms for point process models with intractable likelihoods. A purpose of this paper is to illustrate the utility of using simulation based strategies, including Approximate…

We introduce Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms based on numerical approximations of piecewise-deterministic Markov processes obtained with the framework of splitting schemes. We present unadjusted as well as adjusted algorithms,…

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)…

This paper presents a Markov chain Monte Carlo method to generate approximate posterior samples in retrospective multiple changepoint problems where the number of changes is not known in advance. The method uses conjugate models whereby the…

The multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is a classic example of the exploration-exploitation dilemma. It is concerned with maximising the total rewards for a gambler by sequentially pulling an arm from a multi-armed slot machine where each arm…

We consider parallel asynchronous Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling for problems where we can leverage (stochastic) gradients to define continuous dynamics which explore the target distribution. We outline a solution strategy for…

We propose a novel sampling framework for inference in probabilistic models: an active learning approach that converges more quickly (in wall-clock time) than Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) benchmarks. The central challenge in…

The problem of optimally scaling the proposal distribution in a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm is critical to the quality of the generated samples. Much work has gone into obtaining such results for various Metropolis-Hastings (MH)…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a well-established family of algorithms which are primarily used in Bayesian statistics to sample from a target distribution when direct sampling is challenging. Single instances of MCMC methods are widely…