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Monte Carlo sampling methods are the standard procedure for approximating complicated integrals of multidimensional posterior distributions in Bayesian inference. In this work, we focus on the class of Layered Adaptive Importance Sampling…

Computation · Statistics 2022-07-08 F. Llorente , E. Curbelo , L. Martino , V. Elvira , D. Delgado

We consider the problem of estimating rare event probabilities, focusing on systems whose evolution is governed by differential equations with uncertain input parameters. If the system dynamics is expensive to compute, standard sampling…

Computation · Statistics 2019-11-05 Siddhant Wahal , George Biros

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo and underdamped Langevin Monte Carlo are state-of-the-art methods for taking samples from high-dimensional distributions with a differentiable density function. To generate samples, they numerically integrate…

Computation · Statistics 2025-05-20 Jakob Robnik , Reuben Cohn-Gordon , Uroš Seljak

Sampling from high dimensional distributions is a computational bottleneck in many scientific applications. Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC), and in particular the No-U-Turn Sampler (NUTS), are widely used, yet they struggle on problems with a…

Computation · Statistics 2025-05-20 Jakob Robnik , Reuben Cohn-Gordon , Uroš Seljak

Recent advances in Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) extend the scope of Bayesian inference to models for which the likelihood function is intractable. Although these developments allow us to estimate model parameters, other basic problems…

Computation · Statistics 2019-12-12 Minh-Ngoc Tran , Marcel Scharth , David Gunawan , Robert Kohn , Scott D. Brown , Guy E. Hawkins

Annealed importance sampling (AIS) is the gold standard for estimating partition functions or marginal likelihoods, corresponding to importance sampling over a path of distributions between a tractable base and an unnormalized target. While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-29 Rob Brekelmans , Vaden Masrani , Thang Bui , Frank Wood , Aram Galstyan , Greg Ver Steeg , Frank Nielsen

Annealed Importance Sampling (AIS) and its Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) extensions are state-of-the-art methods for estimating normalizing constants of probability distributions. We propose here a novel Monte Carlo algorithm, Annealed Flow…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-07-12 Michael Arbel , Alexander G. D. G. Matthews , Arnaud Doucet

In sampling tasks, it is common for target distributions to be known up to a normalizing constant. However, in many situations, even evaluating the unnormalized distribution can be costly or infeasible. This issue arises in scenarios such…

Computation · Statistics 2025-02-06 Wei Yuan , Guanyang Wang

In this paper we address the problem of performing Bayesian inference for the parameters of a nonlinear multi-output model and the covariance matrix of the different output signals. We propose an adaptive importance sampling (AIS) scheme…

Computation · Statistics 2025-01-03 E. Curbelo , L. Martino , F. Llorente , D. Delgado-Gomez

We consider the outstanding problem of sampling from an unnormalized density that may be non-log-concave and multimodal. To enhance the performance of simple Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, techniques of annealing type have been…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-18 Wei Guo , Molei Tao , Yongxin Chen

Sampling from hierarchical Bayesian models is often difficult for MCMC methods, because of the strong correlations between the model parameters and the hyperparameters. Recent Riemannian manifold Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (RMHMC) methods have…

Computation · Statistics 2014-06-17 Yichuan Zhang , Charles Sutton

For big data analysis, high computational cost for Bayesian methods often limits their applications in practice. In recent years, there have been many attempts to improve computational efficiency of Bayesian inference. Here we propose an…

Computation · Statistics 2017-04-19 Cheng Zhang , Babak Shahbaba , Hongkai Zhao

This article investigates the integration of quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) methods using the Adaptive Multiple Importance Sampling (AMIS). Traditional Importance Sampling (IS) often suffers from poor performance since it heavily relies on the…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-05-14 Jianlong Chen , Jiarui Du , Xiaoqun Wang , Zhijian He

Normalizing flows are tractable density models that can approximate complicated target distributions, e.g. Boltzmann distributions of physical systems. However, current methods for training flows either suffer from mode-seeking behavior,…

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-04 Minghao Gu , Shiliang Sun

Three approaches for adaptively tuning diagonal scale matrices for HMC are discussed and compared. The common practice of scaling according to estimated marginal standard deviations is taken as a benchmark. Scaling according to the mean…

Computation · Statistics 2024-03-13 Jimmy Huy Tran , Tore Selland Kleppe

In the following article we consider approximate Bayesian parameter inference for observation driven time series models. Such statistical models appear in a wide variety of applications, including econometrics and applied mathematics. This…

Computation · Statistics 2013-04-01 Ajay Jasra , Nikolas Kantas , Elena Ehrlich

Adaptive importance sampling (AIS) methods are increasingly used for the approximation of distributions and related intractable integrals in the context of Bayesian inference. Population Monte Carlo (PMC) algorithms are a subclass of AIS…

Computation · Statistics 2022-06-08 Víctor Elvira , Émilie Chouzenoux

Bayesian reasoning in linear mixed-effects models (LMMs) is challenging and often requires advanced sampling techniques like Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). A common approach is to write the model in a probabilistic programming language…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Jinlin Lai , Justin Domke , Daniel Sheldon

Variational inference (VI) and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) are two main approximate approaches for learning deep generative models by maximizing marginal likelihood. In this paper, we propose using annealed importance sampling for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-18 Xinqiang Ding , David J. Freedman