Related papers: A Point Mass Proposal Method for Bayesian State-Sp…

Variable selection is a key issue when analyzing high-dimensional data. The explosion of data with large sample sizes and dimensionality brings new challenges to this problem in both inference accuracy and computational complexity. To…

In this paper we propose to evaluate and compare Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods to estimate the parameters in a generalized extreme value model. We employed the Bayesian approach using traditional Metropolis-Hastings methods,…

There is much interest in the Hierarchical Dirichlet Process Hidden Markov Model (HDP-HMM) as a natural Bayesian nonparametric extension of the ubiquitous Hidden Markov Model for learning from sequential and time-series data. However, in…

Hidden Markov models (HMMs) are popular models to identify a finite number of latent states from sequential data. However, fitting them to large data sets can be computationally demanding because most likelihood maximization techniques…

A significant part of MCMC methods can be considered as the Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithm with different proposal distributions. From this point of view, the problem of constructing a sampler can be reduced to the question - how to…

We propose a new class of learning algorithms that combines variational approximation and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation. Naive algorithms that use the variational approximation as proposal distribution can perform poorly…

We consider posterior sampling in the very common Bayesian hierarchical model in which observed data depends on high-dimensional latent variables that, in turn, depend on relatively few hyperparameters. When the full conditional over the…

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) has been progressively incorporated within the statistician's toolbox as an alternative sampling method in settings when standard Metropolis-Hastings is inefficient. HMC generates a Markov chain on an augmented…

Motivated by the problem of exploring discrete but very complex state spaces in Bayesian models, we propose a novel Markov Chain Monte Carlo search algorithm: the taxicab sampler. We describe the construction of this sampler and discuss how…

We propose Adaptive Incremental Mixture Markov chain Monte Carlo (AIMM), a novel approach to sample from challenging probability distributions defined on a general state-space. While adaptive MCMC methods usually update a parametric…

Identifying the active factors that have significant impacts on the output of the complex system is an important but challenging variable selection problem in computer experiments. In this paper, a Bayesian hierarchical Gaussian process…

We present a new multiple-try Metropolis-Hastings algorithm designed to be especially beneficial when a tailored proposal distribution is available. The algorithm is based on a given acyclic graph $G$, where one of the nodes in $G$, $k$…

In unsupervised classification, Hidden Markov Models (HMM) are used to account for a neighborhood structure between observations. The emission distributions are often supposed to belong to some parametric family. In this paper, a…

Particle Metropolis-Hastings enables Bayesian parameter inference in general nonlinear state space models (SSMs). However, in many implementations a random walk proposal is used and this can result in poor mixing if not tuned correctly…

Many problems of practical interest rely on Continuous-time Markov chains~(CTMCs) defined over combinatorial state spaces, rendering the computation of transition probabilities, and hence probabilistic inference, difficult or impossible…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are a popular technique in Bayesian statistical modeling. They have long been used to obtain samples from posterior distributions, but recent research has focused on the scalability of these…

The Metropolis-Hastings algorithm is a fundamental Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method for sampling and inference. With the advent of Big Data, distributed and parallel variants of MCMC methods are attracting increased attention. In this…

Infinite Hidden Markov Models (iHMM's) are an attractive, nonparametric generalization of the classical Hidden Markov Model which can automatically infer the number of hidden states in the system. However, due to the infinite-dimensional…

We consider the approximation of expectations with respect to the distribution of a latent Markov process given noisy measurements. This is known as the smoothing problem and is often approached with particle and Markov chain Monte Carlo…

Hidden semi-Markov Models (HSMM's) - while broadly in use - are restricted to a discrete and uniform time grid. They are thus not well suited to explain often irregularly spaced discrete event data from continuous-time phenomena. We show…