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Approximate Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) offers the promise of more rapid sampling at the cost of more biased inference. Since standard MCMC diagnostics fail to detect these biases, researchers have developed computable Stein discrepancy…
For training an encoder network to perform amortized variational inference, the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence from the exact posterior to its approximation, known as the inclusive or forward KL, is an increasingly popular choice of…
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…
Inference-time methods that aggregate and prune multiple samples have emerged as a powerful paradigm for steering large language models, yet we lack any principled understanding of their accuracy-cost tradeoffs. In this paper, we introduce…
We prove a bound on the finite sample error of sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) on static spaces using the $L_2$ distance between interpolating distributions and the mixing times of Markov kernels. This result is unique in that it is the first…
Synthetic likelihood (SL) is a strategy for parameter inference when the likelihood function is analytically or computationally intractable. In SL, the likelihood function of the data is replaced by a multivariate Gaussian density over…
In this article we consider the approximation of expectations w.r.t. probability distributions associated to the solution of partial differential equations (PDEs); this scenario appears routinely in Bayesian inverse problems. In practice,…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulations are modeled as driven by true random numbers. We consider variance bounding Markov chains driven by a deterministic sequence of numbers. The star-discrepancy provides a measure of efficiency of…
In this paper, we propose a novel approach to Bayesian experimental design for non-exchangeable data that formulates it as risk-sensitive policy optimization. We develop the Inside-Out SMC$^2$ algorithm, a nested sequential Monte Carlo…
Along with the recent advances in scalable Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods, sampling techniques that are based on Langevin diffusions have started receiving increasing attention. These so called Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC) methods are based…
Markov chain Monte Carlo is a class of algorithms for drawing Markovian samples from high-dimensional target densities to approximate the numerical integration associated with computing statistical expectation, especially in Bayesian…
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…
Variational Inference approximates an unnormalized distribution via the minimization of Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. Although this divergence is efficient for computation and has been widely used in applications, it suffers from some…
It is often necessary to make sampling-based statistical inference about many probability distributions in parallel. Given a finite computational resource, this article addresses how to optimally divide sampling effort between the samplers…
Segmenting images of low quality or with missing data is a challenging problem. Integrating statistical prior information about the shapes to be segmented can improve the segmentation results significantly. Most shape-based segmentation…
Markov chain Monte Carlo methods are often deemed too computationally intensive to be of any practical use for big data applications, and in particular for inference on datasets containing a large number $n$ of individual data points, also…
We show that genealogical trees arising from a broad class of non-neutral models of population evolution converge to the Kingman coalescent under a suitable rescaling of time. As well as non-neutral biological evolution, our results apply…
A major challenge facing existing sequential Monte-Carlo methods for parameter estimation in physics stems from the inability of existing approaches to robustly deal with experiments that have different mechanisms that yield the results…
This letter provides an adaptive resampling method. It determines the number of particles to resample so that the Kullback-Leibler distance (KLD) between distribution of particles before resampling and after resampling does not exceed a…
Bayesian models have become very popular over the last years in several fields such as signal processing, statistics, and machine learning. Bayesian inference requires the approximation of complicated integrals involving posterior…