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Posterior sampling is a task of central importance in Bayesian inference. For many applications in Bayesian meta-analysis and Bayesian transfer learning, the prior distribution is unknown and needs to be estimated from samples. In practice,…

Computation · Statistics 2024-08-06 Chenyang Zhong , Shouxuan Ji , Tian Zheng

We propose a generic Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm to speed up computations for datasets with many observations. A key feature of our approach is the use of the highly efficient difference estimator from the survey sampling…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-08-03 Matias Quiroz , Mattias Villani , Robert Kohn

Using Markov chain Monte Carlo to sample from posterior distributions was the key innovation which made Bayesian data analysis practical. Notoriously, however, MCMC is hard to tune, hard to diagnose, and hard to parallelize. This…

Computation · Statistics 2022-03-18 Cosma Rohilla Shalizi

In recent years dynamical modelling has been provided with a range of breakthrough methods to perform exact Bayesian inference. However it is often computationally unfeasible to apply exact statistical methodologies in the context of large…

Computation · Statistics 2014-12-24 Umberto Picchini , Julie Lyng Forman

Frequentist profile likelihoods have seen a resurgence in cosmology, offering an alternative to Bayesian methods as they can circumvent the impact of prior-volume effects. This paper presents Procoli, a fast and accessible package to obtain…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2024-01-26 Tanvi Karwal , Yashvi Patel , Alexa Bartlett , Vivian Poulin , Tristan L. Smith , Daniel N. Pfeffer

We present a comprehensive comparison of different Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling methods, evaluating their performance on both standard test problems and cosmological parameter estimation. Our analysis includes traditional…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2025-02-28 Denitsa Staicova

Monte Carlo techniques, including MCMC and other methods, are widely used in Bayesian inference to generate sets of samples from a parameter space of interest. The Python GetDist package provides tools for analysing these samples and…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2025-08-11 Antony Lewis

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-03-31 Elaine Angelino , Eddie Kohler , Amos Waterland , Margo Seltzer , Ryan P. Adams

There is a lack of simple and scalable algorithms for uncertainty quantification. Bayesian methods quantify uncertainty through posterior and predictive distributions, but it is difficult to rapidly estimate summaries of these…

Computation · Statistics 2016-12-28 Cheng Li , Sanvesh Srivastava , David B. Dunson

Bayesian modelling and computational inference by Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a principled framework for large-scale uncertainty quantification, though is limited in practice by computational cost when implemented in the simplest…

Computation · Statistics 2020-09-21 Colin Fox , Tiangang Cui , Markus Neumayer

We present a fast, accurate, robust and flexible method of accelerating parameter estimation. This algorithm, called Pico, can compute the CMB power spectrum and matter transfer function as well as any computationally expensive likelihoods…

Astrophysics · Physics 2008-11-26 William A. Fendt , Benjamin D. Wandelt

Most applications of Bayesian Inference for parameter estimation and model selection in astrophysics involve the use of Monte Carlo techniques such as Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and nested sampling. However, these techniques are time…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2022-01-26 Geetakrishnasai Gunapati , Anirudh Jain , P. K. Srijith , Shantanu Desai

Practitioners of Bayesian statistics have long depended on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) to obtain samples from intractable posterior distributions. Unfortunately, MCMC algorithms are typically serial, and do not scale to the large…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-06-11 Maxim Rabinovich , Elaine Angelino , Michael I. Jordan

The Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm is a widely recognised as an efficient method for sampling a specified posterior distribution. However, when the posterior is multi-modal, conventional MCMC algorithms either tend to become…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2014-08-19 Yi-Ming Hu , Martin Hendry , Ik Siong Heng

The interpretation of cosmological observables requires the use of increasingly sophisticated theoretical models. Since these models are becoming computationally very expensive and display non-trivial uncertainties, the use of standard…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2020-10-14 Marcos Pellejero-Ibañez , Raul E. Angulo , Giovanni Aricó , Matteo Zennaro , Sergio Contreras , Jens Stücker

This paper advocates proximal Markov Chain Monte Carlo (ProxMCMC) as a flexible and general Bayesian inference framework for constrained or regularized estimation. Originally introduced in the Bayesian imaging literature, ProxMCMC employs…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-11-27 Xinkai Zhou , Qiang Heng , Eric C. Chi , Hua Zhou

In this paper, we propose an efficient pseudo-marginal Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling approach to draw samples from posterior shape distributions for image segmentation. The computation time of the proposed approach is independent…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2018-09-05 Ertunc Erdil , Sinan Yildirim , Tolga Tasdizen , Mujdat Cetin

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…

Computation · Statistics 2020-06-02 Richard G Everitt , Richard Culliford , Felipe Medina-Aguayo , Daniel J Wilson

PyPartMC is a Pythonic interface to PartMC, a stochastic, particle-resolved aerosol model implemented in Fortran. Both PyPartMC and PartMC are free, libre, and open-source. PyPartMC reduces the number of steps and mitigates the effort…

Mathematical Software · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Zachary D'Aquino , Sylwester Arabas , Jeffrey Curtis , Akshunna Vaishnav , Nicole Riemer , Matthew West

We consider the problem of estimating rare event probabilities, focusing on systems whose evolution is governed by differential equations with uncertain input parameters. If the system dynamics is expensive to compute, standard sampling…

Computation · Statistics 2019-11-05 Siddhant Wahal , George Biros