Related papers: Kernel Stein Discrepancy thinning: a theoretical p…

A mean function in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS), or a kernel mean, is central to kernel methods in that it is used by many classical algorithms such as kernel principal component analysis, and it also forms the core inference…

The kernel trick concept, formulated as an inner product in a feature space, facilitates powerful extensions to many well-known algorithms. While the kernel matrix involves inner products in the feature space, the sample covariance matrix…

Stein discrepancies have emerged as a powerful statistical tool, being applied to fundamental statistical problems including parameter inference, goodness-of-fit testing, and sampling. The canonical Stein discrepancies require the…

We establish optimal convergence rates for a decomposition-based scalable approach to kernel ridge regression. The method is simple to describe: it randomly partitions a dataset of size N into m subsets of equal size, computes an…

We propose a novel distributed inference algorithm for continuous graphical models, by extending Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) to leverage the Markov dependency structure of the distribution of interest. Our approach combines…

Approximate Bayesian inference estimates descriptors of an intractable target distribution - in essence, an optimization problem within a family of distributions. For example, Langevin dynamics (LD) extracts asymptotically exact samples…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are generally regarded as the gold standard technique for Bayesian inference. They are theoretically well-understood and conceptually simple to apply in practice. The drawback of MCMC is that in…

Cyclical MCMC is a novel MCMC framework recently proposed by Zhang et al. (2019) to address the challenge posed by high-dimensional multimodal posterior distributions like those arising in deep learning. The algorithm works by generating a…

A common tool in the practice of Markov Chain Monte Carlo is to use approximating transition kernels to speed up computation when the desired kernel is slow to evaluate or intractable. A limited set of quantitative tools exist to assess the…

We propose cube thinning, a novel method for compressing the output of a MCMC (Markov chain Monte Carlo) algorithm when control variates are available. It amounts to resampling the initial MCMC sample (according to weights derived from…

We propose a novel method for measuring the discrepancy between a set of samples and a desired posterior distribution for Bayesian inference. Classical methods for assessing sample quality like the effective sample size are not appropriate…

In this paper, we investigate a divide and conquer approach to Kernel Ridge Regression (KRR). Given n samples, the division step involves separating the points based on some underlying disjoint partition of the input space (possibly via…

Learning to differentiate model distributions from observed data is a fundamental problem in statistics and machine learning, and high-dimensional data remains a challenging setting for such problems. Metrics that quantify the disparity in…

There is a growing interest in the literature for adaptive Markov chain Monte Carlo methods based on sequences of random transition kernels $\{P_n\}$ where the kernel $P_n$ is allowed to have an invariant distribution $\pi_n$ not…

Bayesian inference is conceptually elegant, but calculating posterior expectations can entail a heavy computational cost. Monte Carlo methods are reliable and supported by strong asymptotic guarantees, but do not leverage smoothness of the…

Although recovering an Euclidean distance matrix from noisy observations is a common problem in practice, how well this could be done remains largely unknown. To fill in this void, we study a simple distance matrix estimate based upon the…

Non-parametric goodness-of-fit testing procedures based on kernel Stein discrepancies (KSD) are promising approaches to validate general unnormalised distributions in various scenarios. Existing works focused on studying kernel choices to…

Stein kernel has recently shown promising performance on classifying images represented by symmetric positive definite (SPD) matrices. It evaluates the similarity between two SPD matrices through their eigenvalues. In this paper, we argue…

Model-based approaches to reinforcement learning (MBRL) exhibit favorable performance in practice, but their theoretical guarantees in large spaces are mostly restricted to the setting when transition model is Gaussian or Lipschitz, and…

Statistical inference methods are fundamentally important in machine learning. Most state-of-the-art inference algorithms are variants of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) or variational inference (VI). However, both methods struggle with…