Related papers: Iterative importance sampling with Markov chain Mo…

We consider the inverse reinforcement learning problem, that is, the problem of learning from, and then predicting or mimicking a controller based on state/action data. We propose a statistical model for such data, derived from the…

Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) samplers are powerful tools for Bayesian inference but suffer from high computational costs due to their reliance on large particle ensembles for accurate estimates. We introduce persistent sampling (PS), an…

This paper is on Bayesian inference for parametric statistical models that are defined by a stochastic simulator which specifies how data is generated. Exact sampling is then possible but evaluating the likelihood function is typically…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) provides asymptotically consistent estimates of intractable posterior expectations as the number of iterations tends to infinity. However, in large data applications, MCMC can be computationally expensive per…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are commonly used for their versatility in sampling from complicated probability distributions. However, as the dimension of the distribution gets larger, the computational costs for a satisfactory…

Importance sampling is a variance reduction technique for efficient estimation of rare-event probabilities by Monte Carlo. In standard importance sampling schemes, the system is simulated using an a priori fixed change of measure suggested…

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…

Importance sampling (IS) is a Monte Carlo technique for the approximation of intractable distributions and integrals with respect to them. The origin of IS dates from the early 1950s. In the last decades, the rise of the Bayesian paradigm…

We propose bandit importance sampling (BIS), a powerful importance sampling framework tailored for settings in which evaluating the target density is computationally expensive. BIS facilitates accurate sampling while minimizing the required…

The uncertainty of classification outcomes is of crucial importance for many safety critical applications including, for example, medical diagnostics. In such applications the uncertainty of classification can be reliably estimated within a…

We study the computational complexity of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods for high-dimensional Bayesian linear regression under sparsity constraints. We first show that a Bayesian approach can achieve variable-selection consistency…

Bayesian model comparison (BMC) offers a principled approach for assessing the relative merits of competing computational models and propagating uncertainty into model selection decisions. However, BMC is often intractable for the popular…

This article presents an approach to Bayesian semiparametric inference for Gaussian multivariate response regression. We are motivated by various small and medium dimensional problems from the physical and social sciences. The statistical…

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,…

This paper introduces methodology for performing Bayesian inference sequentially on a sequence of posteriors on spaces of different dimensions. We show how this may be achieved through the use of sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) samplers (Del…

Bayesian methods hold significant promise for improving the uncertainty quantification ability and robustness of deep neural network models. Recent research has seen the investigation of a number of approximate Bayesian inference methods…

Bayesian inference is a popular and widely-used approach to infer phylogenies (evolutionary trees). However, despite decades of widespread application, it remains difficult to judge how well a given Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)…

This article presents a Bayesian inferential method where the likelihood for a model is unknown but where data can easily be simulated from the model. We discretize simulated (continuous) data to estimate the implicit likelihood in a…

This paper proposes a family of weighted batch means variance estimators, which are computationally efficient and can be conveniently applied in practice. The focus is on Markov chain Monte Carlo simulations and estimation of the asymptotic…

We study Bayesian methods for large-scale linear inverse problems, focusing on the challenging task of hyperparameter estimation. Typical hierarchical Bayesian formulations that follow a Markov Chain Monte Carlo approach are possible for…