Related papers: Evaluating Posterior Distributions by Selectively …

In Bayesian inference, predictive distributions are typically in the form of samples generated via Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) or related algorithms. In this paper, we conduct a systematic analysis of how to make and evaluate…

Global fits of physics models require efficient methods for exploring high-dimensional and/or multimodal posterior functions. We introduce a novel method for accelerating Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling by pairing a…

Solving ill-posed inverse problems by Bayesian inference has recently attracted considerable attention. Compared to deterministic approaches, the probabilistic representation of the solution by the posterior distribution can be exploited to…

In this paper we present an extension of population-based Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) to the trans-dimensional case. One of the main challenges in MCMC-based inference is that of simulating from high and trans-dimensional target…

A large number of statistical models are "doubly-intractable": the likelihood normalising term, which is a function of the model parameters, is intractable, as well as the marginal likelihood (model evidence). This means that standard…

Monte Carlo algorithms, such as Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC), are routinely used for Bayesian inference in generalized linear models; however, these algorithms are prohibitively slow in massive data…

Varying coefficient models (VCMs) are widely used for estimating nonlinear regression functions for functional data. Their Bayesian variants using Gaussian process priors on the functional coefficients, however, have received limited…

Bayesian model selection provides a powerful framework for objectively comparing models directly from observed data, without reference to ground truth data. However, Bayesian model selection requires the computation of the marginal…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is widely used for Bayesian inference in models of complex systems. Performance, however, is often unsatisfactory in models with many latent variables due to so-called poor mixing, necessitating development…

We introduce and characterise the performance of the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) inference method Prune Sampling for discrete and deterministic Bayesian networks (BNs). We developed a procedure to obtain the performance of a MCMC…

We construct a new framework for accelerating Markov chain Monte Carlo in posterior sampling problems where standard methods are limited by the computational cost of the likelihood, or of numerical models embedded therein. Our approach…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a well-established family of algorithms which are primarily used in Bayesian statistics to sample from a target distribution when direct sampling is challenging. Single instances of MCMC methods are widely…

We propose a very fast approximate Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling framework that is applicable to a large class of sparse Bayesian inference problems, where the computational cost per iteration in several models is of order…

Discrete data are abundant and often arise as counts or rounded data. These data commonly exhibit complex distributional features such as zero-inflation, over-/under-dispersion, boundedness, and heaping, which render many parametric models…

In many real-world engineering systems, the performance or reliability of the system is characterised by a scalar parameter. The distribution of this performance parameter is important in many uncertainty quantification problems, ranging…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are frequently used to perform inference under a Bayesian modeling framework. Convergence diagnostics, such as traceplots, the Gelman-Rubin potential scale reduction factor, and effective sample…

Many probabilistic models introduce strong dependencies between variables using a latent multivariate Gaussian distribution or a Gaussian process. We present a new Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm for performing inference in models with…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are based on the construction of a Markov chain with transition probabilities leaving invariant a probability distribution of interest. In this work, we look at these transition probabilities as…

Exact-sparsity inducing prior distributions in Bayesian analysis typically lead to posterior distributions that are very challenging to handle by standard Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, particular in high-dimensional models with…

The multivariate extended skew-normal distribution allows for accommodating raw data which are skewed and heavy tailed, and has at least three appealing statistical properties, namely closure under conditioning, affine transformations, and…