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Importance sampling (IS) is a Monte Carlo technique for the approximation of intractable distributions and integrals with respect to them. The origin of IS dates from the early 1950s. In the last decades, the rise of the Bayesian paradigm…

Bayesian max-margin models have shown superiority in various practical applications, such as text categorization, collaborative prediction, social network link prediction and crowdsourcing, and they conjoin the flexibility of Bayesian…

We consider the problem of approximate Bayesian parameter inference in non-linear state-space models with intractable likelihoods. Sequential Monte Carlo with approximate Bayesian computations (SMC-ABC) is one approach to approximate the…

Sequential algorithms such as sequential importance sampling (SIS) and sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) have proven fundamental in Bayesian inference for models not admitting a readily available likelihood function. For approximate Bayesian…

Accept-reject based Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are the workhorse algorithm for Bayesian inference. These algorithms, like Metropolis-Hastings, require choosing a proposal distribution which is typically informed by the desired…

In Bayesian inverse problems, one aims at characterizing the posterior distribution of a set of unknowns, given indirect measurements. For non-linear/non-Gaussian problems, analytic solutions are seldom available: Sequential Monte Carlo…

Hierarchical Bayesian models can be especially useful in precision medicine settings, where clinicians are interested in estimating the patient-level latent variables associated with an individual's current health state and its trajectory.…

Non-differentiable priors are standard in modern parsimonious Bayesian models. Lack of differentiability, however, precludes gradient-based Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) for posterior sampling. Recently proposed proximal MCMC approaches…

We establish an ordering criterion for the asymptotic variances of two consistent Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) estimators: an importance sampling (IS) estimator, based on an approximate reversible chain and subsequent IS weighting, and a…

To conduct Bayesian inference with large data sets, it is often convenient or necessary to distribute the data across multiple machines. We consider a likelihood function expressed as a product of terms, each associated with a subset of the…

Mathematical models are invaluable for understanding and predicting how biological systems behave, although their construction requires specifying mechanisms and relationships that are often not perfectly known. In the presence of multiple…

It is common practice to use Laplace approximations to compute marginal likelihoods in Bayesian versions of generalised linear models (GLM). Marginal likelihoods combined with model priors are then used in different search algorithms to…

Bayesian analysis often concerns an evaluation of models with different dimensionality as is necessary in, for example, model selection or mixture models. To facilitate this evaluation, transdimensional Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have not been broadly adopted in Bayesian neural networks (BNNs). This paper initially reviews the main challenges in sampling from the parameter posterior of a neural network via MCMC. Such…

A partially identified model, where the parameters can not be uniquely identified, often arises during statistical analysis. While researchers frequently use Bayesian inference to analyze the models, when Bayesian inference with an…

The Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) method has been recognized as a powerful sampling tool in computational statistics. We show that performance of HMC can be significantly improved by incorporating importance sampling and an irreversible…

Monte Carlo methods are essential tools for Bayesian inference. Gibbs sampling is a well-known Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm, extensively used in signal processing, machine learning, and statistics, employed to draw samples from…

For complex latent variable models, the likelihood function is not available in closed form. In this context, a popular method to perform parameter estimation is Importance Weighted Variational Inference. It essentially maximizes the…

The Metropolis algorithm is a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm used to simulate from parameter distributions of interest, such as generalized linear model parameters. The "Metropolis step" is a keystone concept that underlies…

Can we make Bayesian posterior MCMC sampling more efficient when faced with very large datasets? We argue that computing the likelihood for N datapoints in the Metropolis-Hastings (MH) test to reach a single binary decision is…