Related papers: Divide and Couple: Using Monte Carlo Variational O…

A number of algorithms have been developed to solve probabilistic inference problems on belief networks. These algorithms can be divided into two main groups: exact techniques which exploit the conditional independence revealed when the…

Hierarchical Bayesian inference is often conducted with estimates of the target distribution derived from Monte Carlo sums over samples from separate analyses of parts of the hierarchy or from mock observations used to estimate sensitivity…

We present a new approach to sample from generic binary distributions, based on an exact Hamiltonian Monte Carlo algorithm applied to a piecewise continuous augmentation of the binary distribution of interest. An extension of this idea to…

Bayesian inference allows us to define a posterior distribution over the weights of a generic neural network (NN). Exact posteriors are usually intractable, in which case approximations can be employed. One such approximation - variational…

In this work, we propose a smart idea to couple importance sampling and Multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC). We advocate a per level approach with as many importance sampling parameters as the number of levels, which enables us to compute the…

We provide the first convergence guarantee for full black-box variational inference (BBVI), also known as Monte Carlo variational inference. While preliminary investigations worked on simplified versions of BBVI (e.g., bounded domain,…

The order of convergence of the Monte Carlo method is 1/2 which means that we need quadruple samples to decrease the error in half in the numerical simulation. Multilevel Monte Carlo methods reach the same order of error by spending less…

Many machine learning problems involve Monte Carlo gradient estimators. As a prominent example, we focus on Monte Carlo variational inference (MCVI) in this paper. The performance of MCVI crucially depends on the variance of its stochastic…

We present two Monte Carlo sampling algorithms for probabilistic inference that guarantee polynomial-time convergence for a larger class of network than current sampling algorithms provide. These new methods are variants of the known…

Sequential Monte Carlo methods which involve sequential importance sampling and resampling are shown to provide a versatile approach to computing probabilities of rare events. By making use of martingale representations of the sequential…

Many probabilistic models of interest in scientific computing and machine learning have expensive, black-box likelihoods that prevent the application of standard techniques for Bayesian inference, such as MCMC, which would require access to…

We study numerical integration over bounded regions in $\mathbb{R}^s, s\ge1$ with respect to some probability measure. We replace random sampling with quasi-Monte Carlo methods, where the underlying point set is derived from deterministic…

We propose an adaptive importance sampling scheme for Gaussian approximations of intractable posteriors. Optimization-based approximations like variational inference can be too inaccurate while existing Monte Carlo methods can be too slow.…

We describe a simple method for making inference on a functional of a multivariate distribution. The method is based on a copula representation of the multivariate distribution and it is based on the properties of an Approximate Bayesian…

Two popular classes of methods for approximate inference are Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and variational inference. MCMC tends to be accurate if run for a long enough time, while variational inference tends to give better approximations…

In this article we consider the approximation of expectations w.r.t. probability distributions associated to the solution of partial differential equations (PDEs); this scenario appears routinely in Bayesian inverse problems. In practice,…

The accurate numerical solution of partial differential equations is a central task in numerical analysis allowing to model a wide range of natural phenomena by employing specialized solvers depending on the scenario of application. Here,…

In simulation-based inferences for partially observed Markov process models (POMP), the by-product of the Monte Carlo filtering is an approximation of the log likelihood function. Recently, iterated filtering [14, 13] has originally been…

Discrete data are abundant and often arise as counts or rounded data. These data commonly exhibit complex distributional features such as zero-inflation, over-/under-dispersion, boundedness, and heaping, which render many parametric models…

Variational inference (VI) is a popular approach in Bayesian inference, that looks for the best approximation of the posterior distribution within a parametric family, minimizing a loss that is typically the (reverse) Kullback-Leibler (KL)…