Related papers: An adaptive mixture-population Monte Carlo method …
Evaluating the degree of partisan districting (Gerrymandering) in a statistical framework typically requires an ensemble of districting plans which are drawn from a prescribed probability distribution that adheres to a realistic and…
Mixture models are widely used in Bayesian statistics and machine learning, in particular in computational biology, natural language processing and many other fields. Variational inference, a technique for approximating intractable…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a popular Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm to sample from an unnormalized probability distribution. A leapfrog integrator is commonly used to implement HMC in practice, but its performance can be…
We propose a variance reduction framework for variational inference using the Multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) method. Our framework is built on reparameterized gradient estimators and "recycles" parameters obtained from past update history in…
Performing exact Bayesian inference for complex models is computationally intractable. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms can provide reliable approximations of the posterior distribution but are expensive for large datasets and…
Finite mixture models are used in statistics and other disciplines, but inference for mixture models is challenging due, in part, to the multimodality of the likelihood function and the so-called label switching problem. We propose…
Bayesian inference with Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is challenging when the likelihood function is irregular and expensive to compute. We explore several sampling algorithms that make use of subset evaluations to reduce computational…
A simple and efficient adaptive Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method, called the Metropolized Adaptive Subspace (MAdaSub) algorithm, is proposed for sampling from high-dimensional posterior model distributions in Bayesian variable…
In this article we consider computing expectations w.r.t.~probability laws associated to a certain class of stochastic systems. In order to achieve such a task, one must not only resort to numerical approximation of the expectation, but…
Probabilistic Logic Programming (PLP) languages enable programmers to specify systems that combine logical models with statistical knowledge. The inference problem, to determine the probability of query answers in PLP, is intractable in…
Gaussian random fields play an important role in many areas of science and engineering. In practice, they are often simulated by sampling from a high-dimensional multivariate normal distribution, which arises from the discretisation of a…
Improving efficiency of importance sampler is at the center of research in Monte Carlo methods. While adaptive approach is usually difficult within the Markov Chain Monte Carlo framework, the counterpart in importance sampling can be…
A novel adaptive Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm is presented. The algorithm utilizes sparsity in the partial correlation structure of a density to efficiently estimate the covariance matrix through the Cholesky factor of the precision…
Bayesian inference allows us to define a posterior distribution over the weights of a generic neural network (NN). Exact posteriors are usually intractable, in which case approximations can be employed. One such approximation - variational…
We develop a Monte Carlo-free approach to inference post output from randomized algorithms with a convex loss and a convex penalty. The pivotal statistic based on a truncated law, called the selective pivot, usually lacks closed form…
A generalized method of moments (GMM) estimator is unreliable for a large number of moment conditions, that is, it is comparable, or larger than the sample size. While classical GMM literature proposes several provisions to this problem,…
There is a growing interest in the literature for adaptive Markov chain Monte Carlo methods based on sequences of random transition kernels $\{P_n\}$ where the kernel $P_n$ is allowed to have an invariant distribution $\pi_n$ not…
The Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are popular when considering sampling from a high-dimensional random variable $\mathbf{x}$ with possibly unnormalised probability density $p$ and observed data $\mathbf{d}$. However, MCMC requires…
The Laplace approximation has been one of the workhorses of Bayesian inference. It often delivers good approximations in practice despite the fact that it does not strictly take into account where the volume of posterior density lies.…
Generalized linear mixed models (GLMMs) are often used for analyzing correlated non-Gaussian data. The likelihood function in a GLMM is available only as a high dimensional integral, and thus closed-form inference and prediction are not…