Related papers: Kernel Stein Discrepancy thinning: a theoretical p…
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…
In this paper we address the problem of Monte Carlo approximation of posterior probability distributions in stochastic kinetic models (SKMs). SKMs are multivariate Markov jump processes that model the interactions among species in…
Performing numerical integration when the integrand itself cannot be evaluated point-wise is a challenging task that arises in statistical analysis, notably in Bayesian inference for models with intractable likelihood functions. Markov…
Kernel matrices, as well as weighted graphs represented by them, are ubiquitous objects in machine learning, statistics and other related fields. The main drawback of using kernel methods (learning and inference using kernel matrices) is…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods to sample from a probability distribution $\pi$ defined on a space $(\Theta,\mathcal{T})$ consist of the simulation of realisations of Markov chains $\{\theta_{n},n\geq1\}$ of invariant distribution…
Quantum computers theoretically promise computational advantage in many tasks, but it is much less clear how such advantage can be maintained when using existing and near-term hardware that has limitations in the number and quality of its…
This document presents methods to remove the initialization or burn-in bias from Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) estimates, with consequences on parallel computing, convergence diagnostics and performance assessment. The document is written…
Probabilistic models are conceptually powerful tools for finding structure in data, but their practical effectiveness is often limited by our ability to perform inference in them. Exact inference is frequently intractable, so approximate…
Approximate Bayesian computation has emerged as a standard computational tool when dealing with the increasingly common scenario of completely intractable likelihood functions in Bayesian inference. We show that many common Markov chain…
In this paper, we investigate the minimax properties of Stein block thresholding in any dimension $d$ with a particular emphasis on $d=2$. Towards this goal, we consider a frame coefficient space over which minimaxity is proved. The choice…
Current methods for regularization in machine learning require quite specific model assumptions (e.g. a kernel shape) that are not derived from prior knowledge about the application, but must be imposed merely to make the method work. We…
Sampling from the conditional (or posterior) probability distribution of the latent states of a Hidden Markov Model, given the realization of the observed process, is a non-trivial problem in the context of Markov Chain Monte Carlo. To do…
Kernel ridge regression (KRR) is a well-known and popular nonparametric regression approach with many desirable properties, including minimax rate-optimality in estimating functions that belong to common reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces…
We present a linear regression method for predictions on a small data set making use of a second possibly biased data set that may be much larger. Our method fits linear regressions to the two data sets while penalizing the difference…
Kernel methods underpin many of the most successful approaches in data science and statistics, and they allow representing probability measures as elements of a reproducing kernel Hilbert space without loss of information. Recently, the…
Proximal Markov Chain Monte Carlo is a novel construct that lies at the intersection of Bayesian computation and convex optimization, which helped popularize the use of nondifferentiable priors in Bayesian statistics. Existing formulations…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are often used for approximate inference inside learning, but their slow mixing can be difficult to diagnose and the approximations can seriously degrade learning. To alleviate these issues, we…
We propose a novel adaptive importance sampling algorithm which incorporates Stein variational gradient decent algorithm (SVGD) with importance sampling (IS). Our algorithm leverages the nonparametric transforms in SVGD to iteratively…
Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) was recently proposed as a general purpose nonparametric variational inference algorithm [Liu & Wang, NIPS 2016]: it minimizes the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the target distribution and its…
In large-scale regression problems, random Fourier features (RFFs) have significantly enhanced the computational scalability and flexibility of Gaussian processes (GPs) by defining kernels through their spectral density, from which a finite…