Related papers: pocoMC: A Python package for accelerated Bayesian …
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…