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Nested sampling is widely used in astrophysics for reliably inferring model parameters and comparing models within a Bayesian framework. To address models with many parameters, Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) random walks are incorporated…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-02-20 Johannes Buchner

We develop sampling algorithms to fit Bayesian hierarchical models, the computational complexity of which scales linearly with the number of observations and the number of parameters in the model. We focus on crossed random effect and…

Computation · Statistics 2025-01-03 Omiros Papaspiliopoulos , Timothée Stumpf-Fétizon , Giacomo Zanella

Nested sampling is an increasingly popular technique for Bayesian computation, in particular for multimodal, degenerate problems of moderate to high dimensionality. Without appropriate settings, however, nested sampling software may fail to…

Computation · Statistics 2019-01-23 Edward Higson , Will Handley , Mike Hobson , Anthony Lasenby

Different Markov chains can be used for approximate sampling of a distribution given by an unnormalized density function with respect to the Lebesgue measure. The hit-and-run, (hybrid) slice sampler and random walk Metropolis algorithm are…

Probability · Mathematics 2019-08-15 Daniel Rudolf , Mario Ullrich

Likelihood-free methods, such as approximate Bayesian computation, are powerful tools for practical inference problems with intractable likelihood functions. Markov chain Monte Carlo and sequential Monte Carlo variants of approximate…

Computation · Statistics 2019-02-26 David J. Warne , Ruth E. Baker , Matthew J. Simpson

We present a performant, general-purpose gradient-guided nested sampling algorithm, ${\tt GGNS}$, combining the state of the art in differentiable programming, Hamiltonian slice sampling, clustering, mode separation, dynamic nested…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-08 Pablo Lemos , Nikolay Malkin , Will Handley , Yoshua Bengio , Yashar Hezaveh , Laurence Perreault-Levasseur

Lifted samplers form a class of Markov chain Monte Carlo methods which has drawn a lot attention in recent years due to superior performance in challenging Bayesian applications. A canonical example of lifted samplers is the one that is…

Computation · Statistics 2026-05-01 Philippe Gagnon , Florian Maire

Many machine learning applications require operating on a spatially distributed dataset. Despite technological advances, privacy considerations and communication constraints may prevent gathering the entire dataset in a central unit. In…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-01-30 Alexandros E. Tzikas , Licio Romao , Mert Pilanci , Alessandro Abate , Mykel J. Kochenderfer

We propose nested sequential Monte Carlo (NSMC), a methodology to sample from sequences of probability distributions, even where the random variables are high-dimensional. NSMC generalises the SMC framework by requiring only approximate,…

Computation · Statistics 2015-09-14 Christian A. Naesseth , Fredrik Lindsten , Thomas B. Schön

Statistical inference of the fundamental parameters of supersymmetric theories is a challenging and active endeavor. Several sophisticated algorithms have been employed to this end. While Markov-Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and nested sampling…

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology · Physics 2015-03-17 F. Feroz , K. Cranmer , M. Hobson , R. Ruiz de Austri , R. Trotta

We consider Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms for Bayesian high-dimensional regression with continuous shrinkage priors. A common challenge with these algorithms is the choice of the number of iterations to perform. This is…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-07-13 Niloy Biswas , Anirban Bhattacharya , Pierre E. Jacob , James E. Johndrow

We introduce a novel approach to boost the efficiency of the importance nested sampling (INS) technique for Bayesian posterior and evidence estimation using deep learning. Unlike rejection-based sampling methods such as vanilla nested…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2023-06-30 Johannes U. Lange

Drawing a sample from a discrete distribution is one of the building components for Monte Carlo methods. Like other sampling algorithms, discrete sampling suffers from the high computational burden in large-scale inference problems. We…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-04-29 Yutian Chen , Zoubin Ghahramani

Nested sampling (NS) is a stochastic method for computing the log-evidence of a Bayesian problem. It relies on stochastic estimates of prior volumes enclosed by likelihood contours, which limits the accuracy of the log-evidence calculation.…

Computational Physics · Physics 2024-11-27 Margret Westerkamp , Jakob Roth , Philipp Frank , Will Handley , Torsten Enßlin

Bayesian inference allows us to define a posterior distribution over the weights of a generic neural network (NN). Exact posteriors are usually intractable, in which case approximations can be employed. One such approximation - variational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Andrew Millard , Joshua Murphy , Peter Green , Simon Maskell

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling of densities restricted to linearly constrained domains is an important task arising in Bayesian treatment of inverse problems in the natural sciences. While efficient algorithms for uniform polytope…

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

We present further development and the first public release of our multimodal nested sampling algorithm, called MultiNest. This Bayesian inference tool calculates the evidence, with an associated error estimate, and produces posterior…

Astrophysics · Physics 2011-09-28 F. Feroz , M. P. Hobson , M. Bridges

Lennard-Jones clusters, while an easy system, have a significant number of non equivalent configurations that increases rapidly with the number of atoms in the cluster. Here, we aim at determining the cluster partition function; we use the…

Computational Physics · Physics 2026-02-20 Lune Maillard , Fabio Finocchi , César Godinho , Martino Trassinelli

We propose a Monte Carlo algorithm to sample from high dimensional probability distributions that combines Markov chain Monte Carlo and importance sampling. We provide a careful theoretical analysis, including guarantees on robustness to…

Computation · Statistics 2019-09-18 Giacomo Zanella , Gareth Roberts