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We propose approaches for testing implementations of Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods as well as of general Monte Carlo methods. Based on statistical hypothesis tests, these approaches can be used in a unit testing framework to, for…
Switching state-space models (SSSM) are a very popular class of time series models that have found many applications in statistics, econometrics and advanced signal processing. Bayesian inference for these models typically relies on Markov…
This paper is intended to appear as a chapter for the Handbook of Markov Chain Monte Carlo. The goal of this chapter is to unify various problems at the intersection of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and machine…
Statistical inference methods are fundamentally important in machine learning. Most state-of-the-art inference algorithms are variants of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) or variational inference (VI). However, both methods struggle with…
Testing between hypotheses, when independent sampling is possible, is a well developed subject. In this paper, we propose hypothesis tests that are applicable when the samples are obtained using Markov chain Monte Carlo. These tests are…
The rapid development of computing power and efficient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation algorithms have revolutionized Bayesian statistics, making it a highly practical inference method in applied work. However, MCMC algorithms…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are ubiquitous tools for simulation-based inference in many fields but designing and identifying good MCMC samplers is still an open question. This paper introduces a novel MCMC algorithm, namely,…
Monte Carlo algorithms simulate some prescribed number of samples, taking some random real time to complete the computations necessary. This work considers the converse: to impose a real-time budget on the computation, which results in the…
In sampling tasks, it is common for target distributions to be known up to a normalizing constant. However, in many situations, even evaluating the unnormalized distribution can be costly or infeasible. This issue arises in scenarios such…
Decision trees have found widespread application within the machine learning community due to their flexibility and interpretability. This paper is directed towards learning decision trees from data using a Bayesian approach, which is…
In the thesis we take the split chain approach to analyzing Markov chains and use it to establish fixed-width results for estimators obtained via Markov chain Monte Carlo procedures (MCMC). Theoretical results include necessary and…
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…
Stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (SGMCMC) is a popular class of algorithms for scalable Bayesian inference. However, these algorithms include hyperparameters such as step size or batch size that influence the accuracy of…
In this article we consider Bayesian parameter inference associated to partially-observed stochastic processes that start from a set B0 and are stopped or killed at the first hitting time of a known set A. Such processes occur naturally…
Stochastic gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (SG-MCMC) has been developed as a flexible family of scalable Bayesian sampling algorithms. However, there has been little theoretical analysis of the impact of minibatch size to the algorithm's…
Stochastic optimization in learning and inference often relies on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) to approximate gradients when exact computation is intractable. However, finite-time MCMC estimators are biased, and reducing this bias…
Monte Carlo methods are widely used to estimate observables in many-body quantum systems. However, conventional sampling schemes often require a large number of samples to achieve sufficient accuracy. In this work we propose the…
Leaving posterior sensitivity concerns aside, non-identifiability of the parameters does not raise a difficulty for Bayesian inference as far as the posterior is proper, but multi-modality or flat regions of the posterior induced by the…
Bayesian inference under a set of priors, called robust Bayesian analysis, allows for estimation of parameters within a model and quantification of epistemic uncertainty in quantities of interest by bounded (or imprecise) probability.…
In Bayesian inference, predictive distributions are typically in the form of samples generated via Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) or related algorithms. In this paper, we conduct a systematic analysis of how to make and evaluate…