Related papers: MCMC-Interactive Variational Inference
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods asymptotically sample from complex probability distributions. The pseudo-marginal MCMC framework only requires an unbiased estimator of the unnormalized probability distribution function to construct…
Spatial whole-brain Bayesian modeling of task-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a great computational challenge. Most of the currently proposed methods therefore do inference in subregions of the brain separately or do…
Inference networks of traditional Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are typically amortized, resulting in relatively inaccurate posterior approximation compared to instance-wise variational optimization. Recent semi-amortized approaches were…
We propose a very fast approximate Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling framework that is applicable to a large class of sparse Bayesian inference problems, where the computational cost per iteration in several models is of order…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a powerful tool for sampling from complex probability distributions. Despite its versatility, MCMC often suffers from strong autocorrelation and the negative sign problem, leading to slowing down the…
Many probabilistic models of interest in scientific computing and machine learning have expensive, black-box likelihoods that prevent the application of standard techniques for Bayesian inference, such as MCMC, which would require access to…
This paper proposes a new randomized strategy for adaptive MCMC using Bayesian optimization. This approach applies to non-differentiable objective functions and trades off exploration and exploitation to reduce the number of potentially…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are ubiquitous tools for simulation-based inference in many fields but designing and identifying good MCMC samplers is still an open question. This paper introduces a novel MCMC algorithm, namely,…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are powerful computational tools for analysis of complex statistical problems. However, their computational efficiency is highly dependent on the chosen proposal distribution, which is generally…
We develop nested variational inference (NVI), a family of methods that learn proposals for nested importance samplers by minimizing an forward or reverse KL divergence at each level of nesting. NVI is applicable to many commonly-used…
The multinomial probit model is often used to analyze choice behaviour. However, estimation with existing Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods is computationally costly, which limits its applicability to large choice data sets. This…
Bayesian inference has been broadly applied to statistical network analysis, but suffers from the expensive computational costs due to the nature of Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling algorithms. This paper proposes a novel and…
Amortized variational inference is an often employed framework in simulation-based inference that produces a posterior approximation that can be rapidly computed given any new observation. Unfortunately, there are few guarantees about the…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is the engine of modern Bayesian statistics, being used to approximate the posterior and derived quantities of interest. Despite this, the issue of how the output from a Markov chain is post-processed and…
Tasks such as record linkage and multi-target tracking, which involve reconstructing the set of objects that underlie some observed data, are particularly challenging for probabilistic inference. Recent work has achieved efficient and…
In this paper, we propose a variance reduction approach for Markov chains based on additive control variates and the minimization of an appropriate estimate for the asymptotic variance. We focus on the particular case when control variates…
Variational inference methods often focus on the problem of efficient model optimization, with little emphasis on the choice of the approximating posterior. In this paper, we review and implement the various methods that enable us to…
We propose Adaptive Incremental Mixture Markov chain Monte Carlo (AIMM), a novel approach to sample from challenging probability distributions defined on a general state-space. While adaptive MCMC methods usually update a parametric…
Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are popular likelihood-based generative models which can be efficiently trained by maximizing an Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO). There has been much progress in improving the expressiveness of the variational…
One of the core problems of modern statistics is to approximate difficult-to-compute probability densities. This problem is especially important in Bayesian statistics, which frames all inference about unknown quantities as a calculation…