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We develop a novel Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method that exploits a hierarchy of models of increasing complexity to efficiently generate samples from an unnormalized target distribution. Broadly, the method rewrites the Multilevel…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-09-05 Mikkel B. Lykkegaard , Tim J. Dodwell , Colin Fox , Grigorios Mingas , Robert Scheichl

Bayesian hierarchical modeling is a popular approach to capturing unobserved heterogeneity across individual units. However, standard estimation methods such as Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) can be impracticable for modeling outcomes from…

Methodology · Statistics 2014-11-04 Michael Braun , Paul Damien

When working with multimodal Bayesian posterior distributions, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms have difficulty moving between modes, and default variational or mode-based approximate inferences will understate posterior…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-11-19 Yuling Yao , Aki Vehtari , Andrew Gelman

We consider the problem of estimating expectations with respect to a target distribution with an unknown normalizing constant, and where even the unnormalized target needs to be approximated at finite resolution. Under such an assumption,…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2023-06-29 Xinzhu Liang , Shangda Yang , Simon L. Cotter , Kody J. H. Law

Minimum Bayes-risk (MBR) decoding has recently gained renewed attention in text generation. MBR decoding considers texts sampled from a model as pseudo-references and selects the text with the highest similarity to the others. Therefore,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Atsumoto Ohashi , Ukyo Honda , Tetsuro Morimura , Yuu Jinnai

Adaptive importance sampling is a class of techniques for finding good proposal distributions for importance sampling. Often the proposal distributions are standard probability distributions whose parameters are adapted based on the…

Computation · Statistics 2021-03-10 Topi Paananen , Juho Piironen , Paul-Christian Bürkner , Aki Vehtari

We present a novel technique for amortized posterior estimation using Normalizing Flows trained with likelihood-weighted importance sampling. This approach allows for the efficient inference of theoretical parameters in high-dimensional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Rajneil Baruah

Nested sampling is a powerful approach to Bayesian inference ultimately limited by the computationally demanding task of sampling from a heavily constrained probability distribution. An effective algorithm in its own right, Hamiltonian…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2015-03-02 M. J. Betancourt

Monte Carlo methods represent the "de facto" standard for approximating complicated integrals involving multidimensional target distributions. In order to generate random realizations from the target distribution, Monte Carlo techniques use…

Computation · Statistics 2022-01-21 L. Martino , V. Elvira , D. Luengo , J. Corander

In statistical analysis, Monte Carlo (MC) stands as a classical numerical integration method. When encountering challenging sample problem, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a commonly employed method. However, the MCMC estimator is biased…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2024-11-05 Jiarui Du , Zhijian He

A new segmented compressed sampling method for analog-to-information conversion (AIC) is proposed. An analog signal measured by a number of parallel branches of mixers and integrators (BMIs), each characterized by a specific random sampling…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2015-05-18 Omid Taheri , Sergiy A. Vorobyov

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,…

The sampling efficiency of MCMC methods in Bayesian inference for stochastic volatility (SV) models is known to highly depend on the actual parameter values, and the effectiveness of samplers based on different parameterizations varies…

Computation · Statistics 2019-12-02 Darjus Hosszejni , Gregor Kastner

The normalizing constant plays an important role in Bayesian computation, and there is a large literature on methods for computing or approximating normalizing constants that cannot be evaluated in closed form. When the normalizing constant…

Computation · Statistics 2020-09-02 Yuling Yao , Collin Cademartori , Aki Vehtari , Andrew Gelman

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-11-30 Luigi Acerbi

Bayesian inference for doubly-intractable pairwise exponential graphical models typically involves variations of the exchange algorithm or approximate Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) samplers. However, existing methods for both classes of…

Computation · Statistics 2026-03-30 Yujie Chen , Antik Chakraborty , Anindya Bhadra

We propose an adaptive importance sampling scheme for Gaussian approximations of intractable posteriors. Optimization-based approximations like variational inference can be too inaccurate while existing Monte Carlo methods can be too slow.…

Computation · Statistics 2025-02-04 Willem van den Boom , Andrea Cremaschi , Alexandre H. Thiery

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is one of the main workhorses of probabilistic inference, but it is notoriously hard to measure the quality of approximate posterior samples. This challenge is particularly salient in black box inference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-06-08 Roger B. Grosse , Siddharth Ancha , Daniel M. Roy

We propose a generic approach for numerically efficient simulation from analytically intractable distributions with constrained support. Our approach relies upon Generalized Randomized Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (GRHMC) processes and combines…

Computation · Statistics 2024-06-03 Tore Selland Kleppe , Roman Liesenfeld

We consider Metropolis Hastings MCMC in cases where the log of the ratio of target distributions is replaced by an estimator. The estimator is based on m samples from an independent online Monte Carlo simulation. Under some conditions on…

Computation · Statistics 2012-06-01 Geoff K. Nicholls , Colin Fox , Alexis Muir Watt