Related papers: Free Energy Evaluation Using Marginalized Annealed…
More than twenty years after its introduction, Annealed Importance Sampling (AIS) remains one of the most effective methods for marginal likelihood estimation. It relies on a sequence of distributions interpolating between a tractable…
Probabilistic models based on Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) imply the evaluation of normalized Boltzmann factors, which in turn require from the evaluation of the partition function Z. The exact evaluation of Z, though, becomes a…
Probabilistic models in physics often require from the evaluation of normalized Boltzmann factors, which in turn implies the computation of the partition function Z. Getting the exact value of Z, though, becomes a forbiddingly expensive…
Evaluating expectations on an Ising model (or Boltzmann machine) is essential for various applications, including statistical machine learning. However, in general, the evaluation is computationally difficult because it involves intractable…
Annealed Importance Sampling (AIS) is a popular algorithm used to estimates the intractable marginal likelihood of deep generative models. Although AIS is guaranteed to provide unbiased estimate for any set of hyperparameters, the common…
Annealed importance sampling (AIS) is the gold standard for estimating partition functions or marginal likelihoods, corresponding to importance sampling over a path of distributions between a tractable base and an unnormalized target. While…
Annealed importance sampling (AIS) and related algorithms are highly effective tools for marginal likelihood estimation, but are not fully differentiable due to the use of Metropolis-Hastings correction steps. Differentiability is a…
We consider estimating the marginal likelihood in settings with independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) data. We propose estimating the predictive distributions in a sequential factorization of the marginal likelihood in such…
Sampling from a multimodal distribution is a fundamental and challenging problem in computational science and statistics. Among various approaches proposed for this task, one popular method is Annealed Importance Sampling (AIS). In this…
Annealed Importance Sampling (AIS) moves particles along a Markov chain from a tractable initial distribution to an intractable target distribution. The recently proposed Differentiable AIS (DAIS) (Geffner and Domke, 2021; Zhang et al.,…
The efficient importance sampling (EIS) method is a general principle for the numerical evaluation of high-dimensional integrals that uses the sequential structure of target integrands to build variance minimising importance samplers.…
Mutual information (MI) is a fundamental quantity in information theory and machine learning. However, direct estimation of MI is intractable, even if the true joint probability density for the variables of interest is known, as it involves…
Simulated annealing - moving from a tractable distribution to a distribution of interest via a sequence of intermediate distributions - has traditionally been used as an inexact method of handling isolated modes in Markov chain samplers.…
Ratios of normalizing constants for two distributions are needed in both Bayesian statistics, where they are used to compare models, and in statistical physics, where they correspond to differences in free energy. Two approaches have long…
Importance sampling (IS) is a powerful Monte Carlo (MC) methodology for approximating integrals, for instance in the context of Bayesian inference. In IS, the samples are simulated from the so-called proposal distribution, and the choice of…
Markov random fields (MRFs) are difficult to evaluate as generative models because computing the test log-probabilities requires the intractable partition function. Annealed importance sampling (AIS) is widely used to estimate MRF partition…
Model fitting is possibly the most extended problem in science. Classical approaches include the use of least-squares fitting procedures and maximum likelihood methods to estimate the value of the parameters in the model. However, in recent…
We propose a new Monte Carlo algorithm for the free energy calculation based on configuration space sampling. We implement this algorithm for Ising model. Comparison with the exact free energy shows an excellent agreement. We analyse the…
In Bayesian statistics, many problems can be expressed as the evaluation of the expectation of a quantity of interest with respect to the posterior distribution. Standard Monte Carlo method is often not applicable because the encountered…
In applications of Gaussian processes where quantification of uncertainty is a strict requirement, it is necessary to accurately characterize the posterior distribution over Gaussian process covariance parameters. Normally, this is done by…