Related papers: Simulation-efficient marginal posterior estimation…
Classic Bayesian methods with complex models are frequently infeasible due to an intractable likelihood. Simulation-based inference methods, such as Approximate Bayesian Computing (ABC), calculate posteriors without accessing a likelihood…
Simulator-based models are models for which the likelihood is intractable but simulation of synthetic data is possible. They are often used to describe complex real-world phenomena, and as such can often be misspecified in practice.…
Sampling-based inference techniques are central to modern cosmological data analysis; these methods, however, scale poorly with dimensionality and typically require approximate or intractable likelihoods. In this paper we describe how…
Models of stochastic processes are widely used in almost all fields of science. Theory validation, parameter estimation, and prediction all require model calibration and statistical inference using data. However, data are almost always…
Newton-step approximations to pseudo maximum likelihood estimates of spatial autoregressive models with a large number of parameters are examined, in the sense that the parameter space grows slowly as a function of sample size. These have…
In this paper we develop proximal methods for statistical learning. Proximal point algorithms are useful in statistics and machine learning for obtaining optimization solutions for composite functions. Our approach exploits closed-form…
A common problem in disciplines of applied Statistics research such as Astrostatistics is of estimating the posterior distribution of relevant parameters. Typically, the likelihoods for such models are computed via expensive experiments…
Computation of the marginal likelihood from a simulated posterior distribution is central to Bayesian model selection but is computationally difficult. I argue that the marginal likelihood can be reliably computed from a posterior sample by…
Likelihood-free inference is quickly emerging as a powerful tool to perform fast/effective parameter estimation. We demonstrate a technique of optimizing likelihood-free inference to make it even faster by marginalizing symmetries in a…
Predictive recursion is an accurate and computationally efficient algorithm for nonparametric estimation of mixing densities in mixture models. In semiparametric mixture models, however, the algorithm fails to account for any uncertainty in…
The continuous extension of a discrete random variable is amongst the computational methods used for estimation of multivariate normal copula-based models with discrete margins. Its advantage is that the likelihood can be derived…
Nested simulation is a natural approach to tackle nested estimation problems in operations research and financial engineering. The outer-level simulation generates outer scenarios and the inner-level simulations are run in each outer…
We propose a framework for computing, optimizing and integrating with respect to a smooth marginal likelihood in statistical models that involve high-dimensional parameters/latent variables and continuous low-dimensional hyperparameters.…
Likelihood-free inference refers to inference when a likelihood function cannot be explicitly evaluated, which is often the case for models based on simulators. Most of the literature is based on sample-based `Approximate Bayesian…
Simulation-based inference (SBI) with neural posterior estimation (NPE) provides rapid X-ray spectral fitting in both Gaussian and Poisson regimes by learning approximate parameter posteriors from simulations. We investigate auto-encoders…
Many statistical models in cosmology can be simulated forwards but have intractable likelihood functions. Likelihood-free inference methods allow us to perform Bayesian inference from these models using only forward simulations, free from…
We propose a posterior for Bayesian Likelihood-Free Inference (LFI) based on generalized Bayesian inference. To define the posterior, we use Scoring Rules (SRs), which evaluate probabilistic models given an observation. In LFI, we can…
Likelihood-free inference is concerned with the estimation of the parameters of a non-differentiable stochastic simulator that best reproduce real observations. In the absence of a likelihood function, most of the existing inference methods…
Modern simulation-based inference techniques use neural networks to solve inverse problems efficiently. One notable strategy is neural posterior estimation (NPE), wherein a neural network parameterizes a distribution to approximate the…
There has been a great deal of recent interest in methods for performing lifted inference; however, most of this work assumes that the first-order model is given as input to the system. Here, we describe lifted inference algorithms that…