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The class of $\alpha$-stable distributions enjoys multiple practical applications in signal processing, finance, biology and other areas because it allows to describe interesting and complex data patterns, such as asymmetry or heavy tails,…
In this paper we address the widely-experienced difficulty in tuning Hamiltonian-based Monte Carlo samplers. We develop an algorithm that allows for the adaptation of Hamiltonian and Riemann manifold Hamiltonian Monte Carlo samplers using…
We demonstrate the use of a variational method to determine a quantitative lower bound on the rate of convergence of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms as a function of the target density and proposal density. The bound relies on…
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…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a powerful methodology for the approximation of posterior distributions. However, the iterative nature of MCMC does not naturally facilitate its use with modern highly parallel computation on HPC and cloud…
We study Bayesian estimation of mixture models and argue in favor of fitting the marginal posterior distribution over component assignments directly, rather than Gibbs sampling from the joint posterior on components and parameters as is…
Adaptive Monte Carlo methods are very efficient techniques designed to tune simulation estimators on-line. In this work, we present an alternative to stochastic approximation to tune the optimal change of measure in the context of…
Particle Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods are used to carry out inference in non-linear and non-Gaussian state space models, where the posterior density of the states is approximated using particles. Current approaches usually perform…
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…
To conduct Bayesian inference with large data sets, it is often convenient or necessary to distribute the data across multiple machines. We consider a likelihood function expressed as a product of terms, each associated with a subset of the…
Variational inference lies at the core of many state-of-the-art algorithms. To improve the approximation of the posterior beyond parametric families, it was proposed to include MCMC steps into the variational lower bound. In this work we…
Adaptive importance sampling (AIS) methods provide a useful alternative to Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms for performing inference of intractable distributions. Population Monte Carlo (PMC) algorithms constitute a family of AIS…
Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) methods can be used to sample from posterior distributions when the likelihood function is unavailable or intractable, as is often the case in biological systems. ABC methods suffer from inefficient…
Bayesian nonparametric mixture models offer a rich framework for model based clustering. We consider the situation where the kernel of the mixture is available only up to an intractable normalizing constant. In this case, most of the…
Estimating the predictive uncertainty of a Bayesian learning model is critical in various decision-making problems, e.g., reinforcement learning, detecting adversarial attack, self-driving car. As the model posterior is almost always…
Deriving Bayesian inference for exponential random graph models (ERGMs) is a challenging "doubly intractable" problem as the normalizing constants of the likelihood and posterior density are both intractable. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)…
Gibbs sampling is one of the most commonly used Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms due to its simplicity and efficiency. It cycles through the latent variables, sampling each one from its distribution conditional on the current…
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…
Importance sampling (IS) is a powerful Monte Carlo (MC) technique for approximating intractable integrals, for instance in Bayesian inference. The performance of IS relies heavily on the appropriate choice of the so-called proposal…
Traditionally, the field of computational Bayesian statistics has been divided into two main subfields: variational methods and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). In recent years, however, several methods have been proposed based on combining…