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Related papers: Importance nested sampling with normalising flows

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We present a novel method for sampling iso-likelihood contours in nested sampling using a type of machine learning algorithm known as normalising flows and incorporate it into our sampler nessai. Nessai is designed for problems where…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2021-05-12 Michael J. Williams , John Veitch , Chris Messenger

We present a detailed study of Bayesian inference workflows for pulsar timing array data with a focus on enhancing efficiency, robustness and speed through the use of normalizing flow-based nested sampling. Building on the Enterprise…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2025-11-05 Eleonora Villa , Golam Mohiuddin Shaifullah , Andrea Possenti , Carmelita Carbone

Stochastic sampling algorithms, while an attractive alternative to exact algorithms in very large Bayesian network models, have been observed to perform poorly in evidential reasoning with extremely unlikely evidence. To address this…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2011-06-02 J. Cheng , M. J. Druzdzel

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

Nested Sampling is a method for computing the Bayesian evidence, also called the marginal likelihood, which is the integral of the likelihood with respect to the prior. More generally, it is a numerical probabilistic quadrature rule. The…

Computation · Statistics 2023-10-09 Jonas Latz , Doris Schneider , Philipp Wacker

Bayesian inference involves two main computational challenges. First, in estimating the parameters of some model for the data, the posterior distribution may well be highly multi-modal: a regime in which the convergence to stationarity of…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2019-12-10 F. Feroz , M. P. Hobson , E. Cameron , A. N. Pettitt

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

Many Bayesian inference problems involve high dimensional models for which only a subset of the model variables are of actual interest. All other variables are just nuisance parameters that one would ideally like to integrate out…

Computation · Statistics 2025-08-13 Fabián González , Víctor Elvira , Joaquín Miguez

We present dynesty, a public, open-source, Python package to estimate Bayesian posteriors and evidences (marginal likelihoods) using Dynamic Nested Sampling. By adaptively allocating samples based on posterior structure, Dynamic Nested…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2020-02-12 Joshua S Speagle

We introduce dynamic nested sampling: a generalisation of the nested sampling algorithm in which the number of "live points" varies to allocate samples more efficiently. In empirical tests the new method significantly improves calculation…

Computation · Statistics 2019-08-27 Edward Higson , Will Handley , Mike Hobson , Anthony Lasenby

We introduce a novel technique within the Nested Sampling framework to enhance efficiency of the computation of Bayesian evidence, a critical component in scientific data analysis. In higher dimensions, Nested Sampling relies on Markov…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2023-12-19 Joshua G. Albert

Many applications in computational sciences and statistical inference require the computation of expectations with respect to complex high-dimensional distributions with unknown normalization constants, as well as the estimation of these…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-10-26 Yu Cao , Eric Vanden-Eijnden

Nested sampling is an iterative integration procedure that shrinks the prior volume towards higher likelihoods by removing a "live" point at a time. A replacement point is drawn uniformly from the prior above an ever-increasing likelihood…

Computation · Statistics 2014-12-03 Johannes Buchner

Importance Sampling (IS) is a method for approximating expectations under a target distribution using independent samples from a proposal distribution and the associated importance weights. In many applications, the target distribution is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-09-14 Gabriel Cardoso , Sergey Samsonov , Achille Thin , Eric Moulines , Jimmy Olsson

Many contemporary machine learning models require extensive tuning of hyperparameters to perform well. A variety of methods, such as Bayesian optimization, have been developed to automate and expedite this process. However, tuning remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-25 Setareh Ariafar , Zelda Mariet , Ehsan Elhamifar , Dana Brooks , Jennifer Dy , Jasper Snoek

It was recently emphasised by Riley (2019); Schittenhelm & Wacker (2020) that that in the presence of plateaus in the likelihood function nested sampling (NS) produces faulty estimates of the evidence and posterior densities. After…

Computation · Statistics 2021-03-05 Andrew Fowlie , Will Handley , Liangliang Su

Nested sampling (NS) computes parameter posterior distributions and makes Bayesian model comparison computationally feasible. Its strengths are the unsupervised navigation of complex, potentially multi-modal posteriors until a well-defined…

Computation · Statistics 2023-07-11 Johannes Buchner

Importance Sampling (IS) is a widely used variance reduction technique for enhancing the efficiency of Monte Carlo methods, particularly in rare-event simulation and related applications. Despite its effectiveness, the performance of IS is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-11 Liviu Aolaritei , Bart P. G. Van Parys , Henry Lam , Michael I. Jordan

An essential problem in statistics and machine learning is the estimation of expectations involving PDFs with intractable normalizing constants. The self-normalized importance sampling (SNIS) estimator, which normalizes the IS weights, has…

Computation · Statistics 2024-07-01 Nicola Branchini , Víctor Elvira

In this paper, we present a novel approach to accelerate the Bayesian inference process, focusing specifically on the nested sampling algorithms. Bayesian inference plays a crucial role in cosmological parameter estimation, providing a…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2024-10-17 Isidro Gómez-Vargas , J. Alberto Vázquez
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