Related papers: Nested Sampling And Likelihood Plateaus
Bayesian inference involves two main computational challenges. First, in estimating the parameters of some model for the data, the posterior distribution may well be highly multi-modal: a regime in which the convergence to stationarity of…
A system of nested dichotomies is a method of decomposing a multi-class problem into a collection of binary problems. Such a system recursively applies binary splits to divide the set of classes into two subsets, and trains a binary…
Stratified sampling is a fast and simple method to generate point sets with uniform distribution in hypercubes. However, for the most common paraxial stratfication it has the prominent drawback that the number of sampled points in n…
An algorithm is proposed, analyzed, and tested for solving continuous nonlinear-equality-constrained optimization problems where the objective and constraint functions are defined by expectations or averages over large, finite numbers of…
Metropolis nested sampling evolves a Markov chain from a current livepoint and accepts new points along the chain according to a version of the Metropolis acceptance ratio modified to satisfy the likelihood constraint, characteristic of…
We propose nested sequential Monte Carlo (NSMC), a methodology to sample from sequences of probability distributions, even where the random variables are high-dimensional. NSMC generalises the SMC framework by requiring only approximate,…
Nested sampling has emerged as a valuable tool for Bayesian analysis, in particular for determining the Bayesian evidence. The method is based on a specific type of random sampling of the likelihood function and prior volume of the…
Nested sampling (NS) is a stochastic method for computing the log-evidence of a Bayesian problem. It relies on stochastic estimates of prior volumes enclosed by likelihood contours, which limits the accuracy of the log-evidence calculation.…
We review Skilling's nested sampling (NS) algorithm for Bayesian inference and more broadly multi-dimensional integration. After recapitulating the principles of NS, we survey developments in implementing efficient NS algorithms in practice…
Metropolis Hastings nested sampling evolves a Markov chain, accepting new points along the chain according to a version of the Metropolis Hastings acceptance ratio, which has been modified to satisfy the nested sampling likelihood…
Nested sampling is a Bayesian sampling technique developed to explore probability distributions lo- calised in an exponentially small area of the parameter space. The algorithm provides both posterior samples and an estimate of the evidence…
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…
Nested sampling (NS) is an invaluable tool in data analysis in modern astrophysics, cosmology, gravitational wave astronomy and particle physics. We identify a previously unused property of NS related to order statistics: the insertion…
Considering the issue of estimating small probabilities p, ie. measuring a rare domain F = {x | g(x) > q} with respect to the distribution of a random vector X, Multilevel Splitting strategies (also called Subset Simulation) aim at writing…
A new way to run nested sampling, combined with realistic MCMC proposals to generate new live points, is presented. Nested sampling is run with a fixed number of MCMC steps. Subsequently, snowballing nested sampling extends the run to more…
We investigate a new sampling scheme aimed at improving the performance of particle filters whenever (a) there is a significant mismatch between the assumed model dynamics and the actual system, or (b) the posterior probability tends to…
Scheduled sampling is widely used to mitigate the exposure bias problem for neural machine translation. Its core motivation is to simulate the inference scene during training by replacing ground-truth tokens with predicted tokens, thus…
Nested sampling is an efficient algorithm for the calculation of the Bayesian evidence and posterior parameter probability distributions. It is based on the step-by-step exploration of the parameter space by Monte Carlo sampling with a…
A new unequal probability sampling method is proposed. This method is sequential. The decision to select or not each unit is made based on the order in which the units appear. A variant of this method allows selecting a sample from a…
Sampling is a fundamental technique, and sampling without replacement is often desirable when duplicate samples are not beneficial. Within machine learning, sampling is useful for generating diverse outputs from a trained model. We present…