Related papers: GetDist: a Python package for analysing Monte Carl…
A fundamental challenge in Bayesian inference is efficient representation of a target distribution. Many non-parametric approaches do so by sampling a large number of points using variants of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). We propose an…
Bayesian inference in biological modeling commonly relies on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling of a multidimensional and non-Gaussian posterior distribution that is not analytically tractable. Here, we present the implementation of a…
Traditional gradient-based sampling methods, like standard Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, require that the desired target distribution is continuous and differentiable. This limits the types of models one can define, although the presented models…
Bayesian model selection provides a powerful framework for objectively comparing models directly from observed data, without reference to ground truth data. However, Bayesian model selection requires the computation of the marginal…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is widely used for sampling from high dimensional target distributions with densities known up to proportionality. While HMC exhibits favorable scaling properties in high dimensions, it struggles with strongly…
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…
Bayesian regression remains a simple but effective tool based on Bayesian inference techniques. For large-scale applications, with complicated posterior distributions, Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods are applied. To improve the well-known…
The density ratio of two probability distributions is one of the fundamental tools in mathematical and computational statistics and machine learning, and it has a variety of known applications. Therefore, density ratio estimation from…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is an established approach for uncertainty quantification and propagation in scientific applications. A key challenge in applying MCMC to scientific domains is computation: the target density of interest is…
In the kernel density estimation (KDE) problem one is given a kernel $K(x, y)$ and a dataset $P$ of points in a Euclidean space, and must prepare a data structure that can quickly answer density queries: given a point $q$, output a…
This paper describes a new algorithm for Monte Carlo integration, based on the Field Estimator for Arbitrary Spaces (FiEstAS). The algorithm is discussed in detail, and its performance is evaluated in the context of Bayesian analysis, with…
We develop a novel Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method that exploits a hierarchy of models of increasing complexity to efficiently generate samples from an unnormalized target distribution. Broadly, the method rewrites the Multilevel…
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 investigate the stability of a Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) method applied to the problem of sampling from a target distribution on $\mathbb{R}^d$ for large $d$. It is well known that using a single importance sampling step one produces…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo is a prominent Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm, which employs symplectic integrators to sample from high dimensional target distributions in many applications, such as statistical mechanics, Bayesian statistics…
Practitioners of Bayesian statistics have long depended on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) to obtain samples from intractable posterior distributions. Unfortunately, MCMC algorithms are typically serial, and do not scale to the large…
The preferential sampling of locations chosen to observe a spatio-temporal process has been identified as a major problem across multiple fields. Predictions of the process can be severely biased when standard statistical methodologies are…
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…
We consider the problem of Bayesian parameter estimation for deep neural networks, which is important in problem settings where we may have little data, and/ or where we need accurate posterior predictive densities, e.g., for applications…
We present dimension-free convergence and discretization error bounds for the unadjusted Hamiltonian Monte Carlo algorithm applied to high-dimensional probability distributions of mean-field type. These bounds require the discretization…