Related papers: Kernel Stein Discrepancy thinning: a theoretical p…
Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) and its variants have shown promising successes in approximate inference for complex distributions. In practice, we notice that the kernel used in SVGD-based methods has a decisive effect on the…
Distributional comparison is a fundamental problem in statistical data analysis with numerous applications in a variety of scientific and engineering fields. Numerous methods exist for distributional comparison but kernel Stein's method has…
Stein discrepancies (SDs) monitor convergence and non-convergence in approximate inference when exact integration and sampling are intractable. However, the computation of a Stein discrepancy can be prohibitive if the Stein operator - often…
In this paper we present a general framework for Stein's method for multivariate continuous distributions. The approach gives a collection of Stein characterisations, among which we highlight score-Stein operators and kernel Stein…
This paper proposes and studies a numerical method for approximation of posterior expectations based on interpolation with a Stein reproducing kernel. Finite-sample-size bounds on the approximation error are established for posterior…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is the engine of modern Bayesian statistics, being used to approximate the posterior and derived quantities of interest. Despite this, the issue of how the output from a Markov chain is post-processed and…
Large-scale kernel approximation is an important problem in machine learning research. Approaches using random Fourier features have become increasingly popular [Rahimi and Recht, 2007], where kernel approximation is treated as empirical…
This paper provides a general framework for Stein's density method for multivariate continuous distributions. The approach associates to any probability density function a canonical operator and Stein class, as well as an infinite…
Kernelized Stein discrepancy (KSD), though being extensively used in goodness-of-fit tests and model learning, suffers from the curse-of-dimensionality. We address this issue by proposing the sliced Stein discrepancy and its scalable and…
Sliced Stein discrepancy (SSD) and its kernelized variants have demonstrated promising successes in goodness-of-fit tests and model learning in high dimensions. Despite their theoretical elegance, their empirical performance depends…
Kernelized Stein discrepancy (KSD) is a score-based discrepancy widely used in goodness-of-fit tests. It can be applied even when the target distribution has an unknown normalising factor, such as in Bayesian analysis. We show theoretically…
To improve the efficiency of Monte Carlo estimation, practitioners are turning to biased Markov chain Monte Carlo procedures that trade off asymptotic exactness for computational speed. The reasoning is sound: a reduction in variance due to…
Kernel segmentation aims at partitioning a data sequence into several non-overlapping segments that may have nonlinear and complex structures. In general, it is formulated as a discrete optimization problem with combinatorial constraints. A…
The Markov Chain Monte Carlo method is the dominant paradigm for posterior computation in Bayesian analysis. It is common to control computation time by making approximations to the Markov transition kernel. Comparatively little attention…
Kernel Stein discrepancies (KSDs) have emerged as a powerful tool for quantifying goodness-of-fit over the last decade, featuring numerous successful applications. To the best of our knowledge, all existing KSD estimators with known rate…
We consider the problem of simultaneously learning to linearly combine a very large number of kernels and learn a good predictor based on the learnt kernel. When the number of kernels $d$ to be combined is very large, multiple kernel…
Stein discrepancies have emerged as a powerful tool for retrospective improvement of Markov chain Monte Carlo output. However, the question of how to design Markov chains that are well-suited to such post-processing has yet to be addressed.…
Several emerging post-Bayesian methods target a probability distribution for which an entropy-regularised variational objective is minimised. This increased flexibility introduces a computational challenge, as one loses access to an…
Several statistical approaches based on reproducing kernels have been proposed to detect abrupt changes arising in the full distribution of the observations and not only in the mean or variance. Some of these approaches enjoy good…
This work presents a multilevel variant of Stein variational gradient descent to more efficiently sample from target distributions. The key ingredient is a sequence of distributions with growing fidelity and costs that converges to the…