Related papers: High-dimensional Gaussian sampling: a review and a…
Optimization of expensive computer models with the help of Gaussian process emulators in now commonplace. However, when several (competing) objectives are considered, choosing an appropriate sampling strategy remains an open question. We…
High-probability guarantees in stochastic optimization are often obtained only under strong noise assumptions such as sub-Gaussian tails. We show that such guarantees can also be achieved under the weaker assumption of bounded variance by…
Gaussian variational approximation is a popular methodology to approximate posterior distributions in Bayesian inference especially in high dimensional and large data settings. To control the computational cost while being able to capture…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms have become powerful tools for Bayesian inference. However, they do not scale well to large-data problems. Divide-and-conquer strategies, which split the data into batches and, for each batch, run…
Performing exact Bayesian inference for complex models is computationally intractable. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms can provide reliable approximations of the posterior distribution but are expensive for large datasets and…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) samples efficiently from high-dimensional posterior distributions with proposed parameter draws obtained by iterating on a discretized version of the Hamiltonian dynamics. The iterations make HMC…
There has been recent interest in developing scalable Bayesian sampling methods such as stochastic gradient MCMC (SG-MCMC) and Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) for big-data analysis. A standard SG-MCMC algorithm simulates samples…
Several problems in modeling and control of stochastically-driven dynamical systems can be cast as regularized semi-definite programs. We examine two such representative problems and show that they can be formulated in a similar manner. The…
In parameter estimation problems one computes a posterior distribution over uncertain parameters defined jointly by a prior distribution, a model, and noisy data. Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is often used for the numerical solution of…
Surrogate models have become ubiquitous in science and engineering for their capability of emulating expensive computer codes, necessary to model and investigate complex phenomena. Bayesian emulators based on Gaussian processes adequately…
Variational approximation methods have proven to be useful for scaling Bayesian computations to large data sets and highly parametrized models. Applying variational methods involves solving an optimization problem, and recent research in…
Recent advances in stochastic gradient techniques have made it possible to estimate posterior distributions from large datasets via Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). However, when the target posterior is multimodal, mixing performance is…
Gaussian process (GP) models form a core part of probabilistic machine learning. Considerable research effort has been made into attacking three issues with GP models: how to compute efficiently when the number of data is large; how to…
Sampling from a lattice Gaussian distribution is emerging as an important problem in various areas such as coding and cryptography. The default sampling algorithm --- Klein's algorithm yields a distribution close to the lattice Gaussian…
Markov chain Monte Carlo methods are often deemed too computationally intensive to be of any practical use for big data applications, and in particular for inference on datasets containing a large number $n$ of individual data points, also…
It is well-known that the posterior density of linear inverse problems with Gaussian prior and Gaussian likelihood is also Gaussian, hence completely described by its covariance and expectation. Sampling from a Gaussian posterior may be…
A ubiquitous feature of data of our era is their extra-large sizes and dimensions. Analyzing such high-dimensional data poses significant challenges, since the feature dimension is often much larger than the sample size. This thesis…
The Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) sampling algorithm exploits Hamiltonian dynamics to construct efficient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), which has become increasingly popular in machine learning and statistics. Since HMC uses the gradient…
The problem of sampling constrained continuous distributions has frequently appeared in many machine/statistical learning models. Many Monte Carlo Markov Chain (MCMC) sampling methods have been adapted to handle different types of…
Using Markov chain Monte Carlo to sample from posterior distributions was the key innovation which made Bayesian data analysis practical. Notoriously, however, MCMC is hard to tune, hard to diagnose, and hard to parallelize. This…