Related papers: Robustly estimating the marginal likelihood for co…
We construct a new framework for accelerating Markov chain Monte Carlo in posterior sampling problems where standard methods are limited by the computational cost of the likelihood, or of numerical models embedded therein. Our approach…
This paper develops a Bayesian computational platform at the interface between posterior sampling and optimization in models whose marginal likelihoods are difficult to evaluate. Inspired by adversarial optimization, namely Generative…
Performing Bayesian inference via Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) can be exceedingly expensive when posterior evaluations invoke the evaluation of a computationally expensive model, such as a system of partial differential equations. In…
We consider the generic problem of performing sequential Bayesian inference in a state-space model with observation process y, state process x and fixed parameter theta. An idealized approach would be to apply the iterated batch importance…
Importance sampling is a Monte Carlo method which designs estimators of expectations under a target distribution using weighted samples from a proposal distribution. When the target distribution is complex, such as multimodal distributions…
In this study, we introduce a novel methodological framework called Bayesian Penalized Empirical Likelihood (BPEL), designed to address the computational challenges inherent in empirical likelihood (EL) approaches. Our approach has two…
Importance sampling is a popular technique in Bayesian inference: by reweighting samples drawn from a proposal distribution we are able to obtain samples and moment estimates from a Bayesian posterior over latent variables. Recent work,…
In this work, minibatch MCMC sampling for feedforward neural networks is made more feasible. To this end, it is proposed to sample subgroups of parameters via a blocked Gibbs sampling scheme. By partitioning the parameter space, sampling is…
By providing a framework of accounting for the shared ancestry inherent to all life, phylogenetics is becoming the statistical foundation of biology. The importance of model choice continues to grow as phylogenetic models continue to…
Gibbs sampling is one of the most commonly used Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms due to its simplicity and efficiency. It cycles through the latent variables, sampling each one from its distribution conditional on the current…
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…
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…
The marginal likelihood, or evidence, plays a central role in Bayesian model selection, yet remains notoriously challenging to compute in likelihood-free settings. While Simulation-Based Inference (SBI) techniques such as Sequential Neural…
We consider the approximation of expectations with respect to the distribution of a latent Markov process given noisy measurements. This is known as the smoothing problem and is often approached with particle and Markov chain Monte Carlo…
Approaches to Bayesian inference for problems with intractable likelihoods have become increasingly important in recent years. Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) and "likelihood free" Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques are popular…
We introduce and characterise the performance of the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) inference method Prune Sampling for discrete and deterministic Bayesian networks (BNs). We developed a procedure to obtain the performance of a MCMC…
This paper addresses the problem of estimating the Potts parameter B jointly with the unknown parameters of a Bayesian model within a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm. Standard MCMC methods cannot be applied to this problem because…
Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) is a useful class of methods for Bayesian inference when the likelihood function is computationally intractable. In practice, the basic ABC algorithm may be inefficient in the presence of discrepancy…
Monte Carlo sampling methods are the standard procedure for approximating complicated integrals of multidimensional posterior distributions in Bayesian inference. In this work, we focus on the class of Layered Adaptive Importance Sampling…
The Hawkes process is a widely used model in many areas, such as finance, seismology, neuroscience, epidemiology, and social sciences. Estimation of the Hawkes process from continuous observations of a sample path is relatively…