Related papers: The reproducing Stein kernel approach for post-hoc…
Gradient information on the sampling distribution can be used to reduce the variance of Monte Carlo estimators via Stein's method. An important application is that of estimating an expectation of a test function along the sample path of a…
We introduce kernel thinning, a new procedure for compressing a distribution $\mathbb{P}$ more effectively than i.i.d. sampling or standard thinning. Given a suitable reproducing kernel $\mathbf{k}_{\star}$ and $O(n^2)$ time, kernel…
Adaptive importance sampling is a widely spread Monte Carlo technique that uses a re-weighting strategy to iteratively estimate the so-called target distribution. A major drawback of adaptive importance sampling is the large variance of the…
Adaptive importance sampling is a powerful tool to sample from complicated target densities, but its success depends sensitively on the initial proposal density. An algorithm is presented to automatically perform the initialization using…
In this paper we present a general framework for Stein's method for multivariate continuous distributions. The approach gives a collection of Stein characterisations, among which we highlight score-Stein operators and kernel Stein…
A novel strategy that combines a given collection of $\pi$-reversible Markov kernels is proposed. At each Markov transition, one of the available kernels is selected via a state-dependent probability distribution. In contrast to random-scan…
We derive a new discrepancy statistic for measuring differences between two probability distributions based on combining Stein's identity with the reproducing kernel Hilbert space theory. We apply our result to test how well a probabilistic…
We make two closely related theoretical contributions to the use of importance sampling schemes. First, for independent sampling, we prove that the minimax optimal trial distribution coincides with the target if and only if the target…
Kernel based methods provide a way to reconstruct potentially high-dimensional functions from meshfree samples, i.e., sampling points and corresponding target values. A crucial ingredient for this to be successful is the distribution of the…
A Kernel Adaptive Metropolis-Hastings algorithm is introduced, for the purpose of sampling from a target distribution with strongly nonlinear support. The algorithm embeds the trajectory of the Markov chain into a reproducing kernel Hilbert…
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…
Low-rank approximations of large kernel matrices are ubiquitous in machine learning, particularly for scaling Gaussian Processes to massive datasets. The Pivoted Cholesky decomposition is a standard tool for this task, offering a…
Computable Stein discrepancies have been deployed for a variety of applications, ranging from sampler selection in posterior inference to approximate Bayesian inference to goodness-of-fit testing. Existing convergence-determining Stein…
Modern compression methods can summarize a target distribution $\mathbb{P}$ more succinctly than i.i.d. sampling but require access to a low-bias input sequence like a Markov chain converging quickly to $\mathbb{P}$. We introduce a new…
Among dissimilarities between probability distributions, the Kernel Stein Discrepancy (KSD) has received much interest recently. We investigate the properties of its Wasserstein gradient flow to approximate a target probability distribution…
We propose a novel adaptive importance sampling algorithm which incorporates Stein variational gradient decent algorithm (SVGD) with importance sampling (IS). Our algorithm leverages the nonparametric transforms in SVGD to iteratively…
Models with intractable normalizing functions have numerous applications. Because the normalizing constants are functions of the parameters of interest, standard Markov chain Monte Carlo cannot be used for Bayesian inference for these…
Sampling is an important tool for estimating large, complex sums and integrals over high dimensional spaces. For instance, important sampling has been used as an alternative to exact methods for inference in belief networks. Ideally, we…
The Marchenko method retrieves the responses to virtual sources in the subsurface, accounting for all orders of multiples. The method is based on two integral representations for focusing and Green's functions. In discretized form these…
Kernel mean embeddings, a widely used technique in machine learning, map probability distributions to elements of a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). For supervised learning problems, where input-output pairs are observed, the…