Related papers: Parallelising MCMC via Random Forests
Probabilistic models are conceptually powerful tools for finding structure in data, but their practical effectiveness is often limited by our ability to perform inference in them. Exact inference is frequently intractable, so approximate…
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…
Bayesian inverse problems often involve sampling posterior distributions on infinite-dimensional function spaces. Traditional Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are characterized by deteriorating mixing times upon mesh-refinement,…
We consider posterior sampling in the very common Bayesian hierarchical model in which observed data depends on high-dimensional latent variables that, in turn, depend on relatively few hyperparameters. When the full conditional over the…
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…
Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) is a popular inference method when likelihoods are hard to come by. Practical bottlenecks of ABC applications include selecting statistics that summarize the data without losing too much information or…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are widely used to sample from complicated distributions, especially to sample from the posterior distribution in Bayesian inference. However, MCMC is not directly applicable when facing the doubly…
In this chapter, we address the challenge of exploring the posterior distributions of Bayesian inverse problems with computationally intensive forward models. We consider various multivariate proposal distributions, and compare them with…
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…
The analysis of large scale medical claims data has the potential to improve quality of care by generating insights which can be used to create tailored medical programs. In particular, the multivariate probit model can be used to…
It is common practice to use Laplace approximations to compute marginal likelihoods in Bayesian versions of generalised linear models (GLM). Marginal likelihoods combined with model priors are then used in different search algorithms to…
In many domains, we are interested in analyzing the structure of the underlying distribution, e.g., whether one variable is a direct parent of the other. Bayesian model-selection attempts to find the MAP model and use its structure to…
With the rapidly growing scales of statistical problems, subset based communication-free parallel MCMC methods are a promising future for large scale Bayesian analysis. In this article, we propose a new Weierstrass sampler for parallel MCMC…
Quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) methods for estimating integrals are attractive since the resulting estimators typically converge at a faster rate than pseudo-random Monte Carlo. However, they can be difficult to set up on arbitrary posterior…
Bayesian low-rank matrix factorization techniques have become an essential tool for relational data analysis and matrix completion. A standard approach is to assign zero-mean Gaussian priors on the columns or rows of factor matrices to…
Few problems in statistics are as perplexing as variable selection in the presence of very many redundant covariates. The variable selection problem is most familiar in parametric environments such as the linear model or additive variants…
We present a general framework for accelerating a large class of widely used Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. Our approach exploits fast, iterative approximations to the target density to speculatively evaluate many potential…
The past decades have seen enormous improvements in computational inference based on statistical models, with continual enhancement in a wide range of computational tools, in competition. In Bayesian inference, first and foremost, MCMC…
We present a novel Bayesian inference tool that uses a neural network to parameterise efficient Markov Chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC) proposals. The target distribution is first transformed into a diagonal, unit variance Gaussian by a series of…
We propose new Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms to sample probability distributions on submanifolds, which generalize previous methods by allowing the use of set-valued maps in the proposal step of the MCMC algorithms. The motivation for…