Related papers: $R^*$: A robust MCMC convergence diagnostic with u…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) provides a feasible method for inferring Hidden Markov models, however, it is often computationally prohibitive, especially constrained by the curse of dimensionality, as the Monte Carlo sampler traverses…
Sequential Monte Carlo Samplers are a class of stochastic algorithms for Monte Carlo integral estimation w.r.t. probability distributions, which combine elements of Markov chain Monte Carlo methods and importance sampling/resampling…
In the context of nonparametric Bayesian estimation a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm is devised and implemented to sample from the posterior distribution of the drift function of a continuously or discretely observed one-dimensional…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are a powerful tool for computation with complex probability distributions. However the performance of such methods is critically dependant on properly tuned parameters, most of which are difficult if…
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…
Rich data generating mechanisms are ubiquitous in this age of information and require complex statistical models to draw meaningful inference. While Bayesian analysis has seen enormous development in the last 30 years, benefitting from the…
We consider the inverse reinforcement learning problem, that is, the problem of learning from, and then predicting or mimicking a controller based on state/action data. We propose a statistical model for such data, derived from the…
Bayesian inference promises to ground and improve the performance of deep neural networks. It promises to be robust to overfitting, to simplify the training procedure and the space of hyperparameters, and to provide a calibrated measure of…
Markov-chain Monte Carlo sampling has become a standard technique for exploring the posterior distribution of cosmological parameters constrained by observations of CMB anisotropies. Given an infinite amount of time, any MCMC sampler will…
There is a lack of simple and scalable algorithms for uncertainty quantification. Bayesian methods quantify uncertainty through posterior and predictive distributions, but it is difficult to rapidly estimate summaries of these…
We provide explicit nonasymptotic estimates for the rate of convergence of empirical means of Markov chains, together with a Gaussian or exponential control on the deviations of empirical means. These estimates hold under a "positive…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are often used for approximate inference inside learning, but their slow mixing can be difficult to diagnose and the approximations can seriously degrade learning. To alleviate these issues, we…
Model comparison for the purposes of selection, averaging and validation is a problem found throughout statistics. Within the Bayesian paradigm, these problems all require the calculation of the posterior probabilities of models within a…
We develop exact Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for discretely-sampled, directly and indirectly observed diffusions. The qualification "exact" refers to the fact that the invariant and limiting distribution of the Markov chains is the…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have existed for a long time and the field is well-explored. The purpose of MCMC methods is to approximate a distribution through repeated sampling; most MCMC algorithms exhibit asymptotically optimal…
A central statistical problem in population genetics is to infer evolutionary and biological parameters such as the strength of natural selection and allele age from DNA samples extracted from a contemporary population. That all samples…
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…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods provide consistent of integrals as the number of iterations goes to infinity. MCMC estimators are generally biased after any fixed number of iterations. We propose to remove this bias by using…
As modern neural networks get more complex, specifying a model with high predictive performance and sound uncertainty quantification becomes a more challenging task. Despite some promising theoretical results on the true posterior…
Bayesian inference for nonlinear diffusions, observed at discrete times, is a challenging task that has prompted the development of a number of algorithms, mainly within the computational statistics community. We propose a new direction,…