Related papers: Accelerating astronomical and cosmological inferen…

We present a Bayesian sampling algorithm called adaptive importance sampling or Population Monte Carlo (PMC), whose computational workload is easily parallelizable and thus has the potential to considerably reduce the wall-clock time…

Monte Carlo methods are widely used for approximating complicated, multidimensional integrals for Bayesian inference. Population Monte Carlo (PMC) is an important class of Monte Carlo methods, which utilizes a population of proposals to…

Population Monte Carlo (PMC) sampling methods are powerful tools for approximating distributions of static unknowns given a set of observations. These methods are iterative in nature: at each step they generate samples from a proposal…

In many problems, complex non-Gaussian and/or nonlinear models are required to accurately describe a physical system of interest. In such cases, Monte Carlo algorithms are remarkably flexible and extremely powerful approaches to solve such…

Sampling from distributions play a crucial role in aiding practitioners with statistical inference. However, in numerous situations, obtaining exact samples from complex distributions is infeasible. Consequently, researchers often turn to…

pocoMC is a Python package for accelerated Bayesian inference in astronomy and cosmology. The code is designed to sample efficiently from posterior distributions with non-trivial geometry, including strong multimodality and non-linearity.…

Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods are a widely used set of computational tools for inference in non-linear non-Gaussian state-space models. We propose a new SMC algorithm to compute the expectation of additive functionals recursively.…

We present a general framework for accelerating a large class of widely used Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. Our approach exploits fast, iterative approximations to the target density to speculatively evaluate many potential…

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…

A core problem in statistics and probabilistic machine learning is to compute probability distributions and expectations. This is the fundamental problem of Bayesian statistics and machine learning, which frames all inference as…

Adaptive importance sampling (AIS) methods are increasingly used for the approximation of distributions and related intractable integrals in the context of Bayesian inference. Population Monte Carlo (PMC) algorithms are a subclass of AIS…

Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) methods can be used to sample from posterior distributions when the likelihood function is unavailable or intractable, as is often the case in biological systems. ABC methods suffer from inefficient…

We present the public release of the Bayesian sampling algorithm for cosmology, CosmoPMC (Cosmology Population Monte Carlo). CosmoPMC explores the parameter space of various cosmological probes, and also provides a robust estimate of the…

Estimating high-quality images while also quantifying their uncertainty are two desired features in an image reconstruction algorithm for solving ill-posed inverse problems. In this paper, we propose plug-and-play Monte Carlo (PMC) as a…

Approximate inference in probabilistic graphical models (PGMs) can be grouped into deterministic methods and Monte-Carlo-based methods. The former can often provide accurate and rapid inferences, but are typically associated with biases…

We present a novel Bayesian inference tool that uses a neural network to parameterise efficient Markov Chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC) proposals. The target distribution is first transformed into a diagonal, unit variance Gaussian by a series of…

Adaptive importance sampling (AIS) methods provide a useful alternative to Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms for performing inference of intractable distributions. Population Monte Carlo (PMC) algorithms constitute a family of AIS…

We show how to speed up Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) for Bayesian inference in large data problems by data subsampling. SMC sequentially updates a cloud of particles through a sequence of distributions, beginning with a distribution that is…

This paper addresses the problem of Monte Carlo approximation of posterior probability distributions. In particular, we have considered a recently proposed technique known as population Monte Carlo (PMC), which is based on an iterative…

Sequential Monte Carlo methods, also known as particle methods, are a popular set of techniques for approximating high-dimensional probability distributions and their normalizing constants. These methods have found numerous applications in…