Related papers: Structured Stochastic Gradient MCMC
Recent developments in big data and analytics research have produced an abundance of large data sets that are too big to be analyzed in their entirety, due to limits on computer memory or storage capacity. To address these issues,…
Factors models are routinely used to analyze high-dimensional data in both single-study and multi-study settings. Bayesian inference for such models relies on Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods which scale poorly as the number of…
Using Markov chain Monte Carlo to sample from posterior distributions was the key innovation which made Bayesian data analysis practical. Notoriously, however, MCMC is hard to tune, hard to diagnose, and hard to parallelize. This…
In Variational Inference (VI), coordinate-ascent and gradient-based approaches are two major types of algorithms for approximating difficult-to-compute probability densities. In real-world implementations of complex models, Monte Carlo…
Performing numerical integration when the integrand itself cannot be evaluated point-wise is a challenging task that arises in statistical analysis, notably in Bayesian inference for models with intractable likelihood functions. Markov…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are often used for approximate inference inside learning, but their slow mixing can be difficult to diagnose and the approximations can seriously degrade learning. To alleviate these issues, we…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms have become powerful tools for Bayesian inference. However, they do not scale well to large-data problems. Divide-and-conquer strategies, which split the data into batches and, for each batch, run…
In this paper, we address the challenge of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms within the approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) framework, which often get trapped in local optima due to their inherent local exploration mechanism. We…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are a powerful but computationally expensive way of performing non-parametric Bayesian inference. MCMC proposals which utilise gradients, such as Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC), can better explore the…
Bayesian phylogenetic inference is currently done via Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) with simple proposal mechanisms. This hinders exploration efficiency and often requires long runs to deliver accurate posterior estimates. In this paper,…
Recent variational Bayes methods for geospatial regression, proposed as an alternative to computationally expensive Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling, have leveraged Nearest Neighbor Gaussian processes (NNGP) to achieve scalability.…
We introduce a framework for efficient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms targeting discrete-valued high-dimensional distributions, such as posterior distributions in Bayesian variable selection (BVS) problems. We show that many…
Monte Carlo sampling for Bayesian posterior inference is a common approach used in machine learning. The Markov Chain Monte Carlo procedures that are used are often discrete-time analogues of associated stochastic differential equations…
We introduce a novel training principle for probabilistic models that is an alternative to maximum likelihood. The proposed Generative Stochastic Networks (GSN) framework is based on learning the transition operator of a Markov chain whose…
Variational inference has recently emerged as a popular alternative to the classical Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) in large-scale Bayesian inference. The core idea is to trade statistical accuracy for computational efficiency. In this…
Leveraging well-established MCMC strategies, we propose MCMC-interactive variational inference (MIVI) to not only estimate the posterior in a time constrained manner, but also facilitate the design of MCMC transitions. Constructing a…
We present an original simulation-based method to estimate likelihood ratios efficiently for general state-space models. Our method relies on a novel use of the conditional Sequential Monte Carlo (cSMC) algorithm introduced in…
Variational Bayes (VB) is a popular scalable alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo for Bayesian inference. We study a mean-field spike and slab VB approximation of widely used Bayesian model selection priors in sparse high-dimensional…
Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) is a methodology for sampling approximately from a sequence of probability distributions of increasing dimension and estimating their normalizing constants. We propose here an alternative methodology named…
We introduce a new algorithm for approximate inference that combines reparametrization, Markov chain Monte Carlo and variational methods. We construct a very flexible implicit variational distribution synthesized by an arbitrary Markov…