Related papers: Why Simple Quadrature is just as good as Monte Car…
Driven by several successful applications such as in stochastic gradient descent or in Bayesian computation, control variates have become a major tool for Monte Carlo integration. However, standard methods do not allow the distribution of…
The standard Kernel Quadrature method for numerical integration with random point sets (also called Bayesian Monte Carlo) is known to converge in root mean square error at a rate determined by the ratio $s/d$, where $s$ and $d$ encode the…
Classical algorithms in numerical analysis for numerical integration (quadrature/cubature) follow the principle of approximate and integrate: the integrand is approximated by a simple function (e.g. a polynomial), which is then integrated…
The classical approaches to numerically integrating a function $f$ are Monte Carlo (MC) and quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) methods. MC methods use random samples to evaluate $f$ and have error $O(\sigma(f)/\sqrt{n})$, where $\sigma(f)$ is the…
We show that repulsive random variables can yield Monte Carlo methods with faster convergence rates than the typical $N^{-1/2}$, where $N$ is the number of integrand evaluations. More precisely, we propose stochastic numerical quadratures…
Integration over non-negative integrands is a central problem in machine learning (e.g. for model averaging, (hyper-)parameter marginalisation, and computing posterior predictive distributions). Bayesian Quadrature is a probabilistic…
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…
Bayesian models have become very popular over the last years in several fields such as signal processing, statistics, and machine learning. Bayesian inference requires the approximation of complicated integrals involving posterior…
Importance Sampling (IS), an effective variance reduction strategy in Monte Carlo (MC) simulation, is frequently utilized for Bayesian inference and other statistical challenges. Quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) replaces the random samples in MC…
Discrepancies play an important role in the study of uniformity properties of point sets. Their probability distributions are a help in the analysis of the efficiency of the Quasi Monte Carlo method of numerical integration, which uses…
Motivated mainly by applications to partial differential equations with random coefficients, we introduce a new class of Monte Carlo estimators, called Toeplitz Monte Carlo (TMC) estimator for approximating the integral of a multivariate…
Recent advances in machine learning have led to the development of new methods for enhancing Monte Carlo methods such as Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and importance sampling (IS). One such method is normalizing flows, which use a neural…
Monte Carlo (MC) integration is the de facto method for approximating the predictive distribution of Bayesian neural networks (BNNs). But, even with many MC samples, Gaussian-based BNNs could still yield bad predictive performance due to…
We consider the problem of computing an approximation to the integral $I=\int_{[0,1]^d}f(x) dx$. Monte Carlo (MC) sampling typically attains a root mean squared error (RMSE) of $O(n^{-1/2})$ from $n$ independent random function evaluations.…
We propose a Monte Carlo algorithm to sample from high dimensional probability distributions that combines Markov chain Monte Carlo and importance sampling. We provide a careful theoretical analysis, including guarantees on robustness to…
Importance sampling (IS) is valuable in reducing the variance of Monte Carlo sampling for many areas, including finance, rare event simulation, and Bayesian inference. It is natural and obvious to combine quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) methods…
Conventional Monte Carlo simulations are stochastic in the sense that the acceptance of a trial move is decided by comparing a computed acceptance probability with a random number, uniformly distributed between 0 and 1. Here we consider the…
We present a novel technique for tailoring Bayesian quadrature (BQ) to model selection. The state-of-the-art for comparing the evidence of multiple models relies on Monte Carlo methods, which converge slowly and are unreliable for…
In the Monte Carlo (MC) method statistical noise is usually present. Statistical noise may become dominant in the calculation of a distribution, usually by iteration, but is less Important in calculating integrals. The subject of the…
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…