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Latent Gaussian models have a rich history in statistics and machine learning, with applications ranging from factor analysis to compressed sensing to time series analysis. The classical method for maximizing the likelihood of these models…
Bayesian Optimization (BO) is a sample-efficient optimization algorithm widely employed across various applications. In some challenging BO tasks, input uncertainty arises due to the inevitable randomness in the optimization process, such…
The EM algorithm is a powerful tool for maximum likelihood estimation with missing data. In practice, the calculations required for the EM algorithm are often intractable. We review numerous methods to circumvent this intractability, all of…
This work proposes ensemble Kalman randomized maximum likelihood estimation, a new derivative-free method for performing randomized maximum likelihood estimation, which is a method that can be used to generate approximate samples from…
The formalism of Bayesian model selection provides a very elegant way of ranking different physical models in terms of how compatible they are with a given set of observed data. However, its practical application is often hampered by the…
Simulation-based inference (SBI) methods such as approximate Bayesian computation (ABC), synthetic likelihood, and neural posterior estimation (NPE) rely on simulating statistics to infer parameters of intractable likelihood models.…
Cosmological parameter estimation is traditionally performed in the Bayesian context. By adopting an "agnostic" statistical point of view, we show the interest of confronting the Bayesian results to a frequentist approach based on…
Cosmological inference becomes increasingly difficult when complex data-generating processes cannot be modeled by simple probability distributions. With the ever-increasing size of data sets in cosmology, there is increasing burden placed…
There is an increasing amount of literature focused on Bayesian computational methods to address problems with intractable likelihood. One approach is a set of algorithms known as Approximate Bayesian Computational (ABC) methods. One of the…
Latent class model (LCM), which is a finite mixture of different categorical distributions, is one of the most widely used models in statistics and machine learning fields. Because of its non-continuous nature and the flexibility in shape,…
This chapter will appear in the forthcoming Handbook of Approximate Bayesian Computation (2018). Indirect inference (II) is a classical likelihood-free approach that pre-dates the main developments of ABC and relies on simulation from a…
Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) is a family of computational techniques in Bayesian statistics. These techniques allow to fi t a model to data without relying on the computation of the model likelihood. They instead require to…
Mechanistic models of single-neuron dynamics have been extensively studied in computational neuroscience. However, identifying which models can quantitatively reproduce empirically measured data has been challenging. We propose to overcome…
Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) is a likelihood-free inference method that has been employed in various applications. However, ABC can be sensitive to outliers if a data discrepancy measure is chosen inappropriately. In this paper,…
When prior information is lacking, the go-to strategy for probabilistic inference is to combine a "default prior" and the likelihood via Bayes's theorem. Objective Bayes, (generalized) fiducial inference, etc. fall under this umbrella. This…
Likelihood-free methods are an essential tool for performing inference for implicit models which can be simulated from, but for which the corresponding likelihood is intractable. However, common likelihood-free methods do not scale well to…
By the nature of their construction, many statistical models for extremes result in likelihood functions that are computationally prohibitive to evaluate. This is consequently problematic for the purposes of likelihood-based inference. With…
Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) is typically used when the likelihood is either unavailable or intractable but where data can be simulated under different parameter settings using a forward model. Despite the recent interest in ABC,…
Both Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) and composite likelihood methods are useful for Bayesian and frequentist inference, respectively, when the likelihood function is intractable. We propose to use composite likelihood score…
Inferential models (IMs) offer prior-free, Bayesian-like posterior degrees of belief designed for statistical inference, which feature a frequentist-like calibration property that ensures reliability of said inferences. The catch is that…