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We propose a new fiducial Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method for fitting parametric Gaussian models. We utilize the Cayley transform to decompose the parametric covariance matrix, which in turn allows us to formulate a general data…

The efficiency of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) depends on how the underlying geometry of the problem is taken into account. For distributions with strongly varying curvature, Riemannian metrics help in efficient exploration of the target…

Many machine learning problems involve Monte Carlo gradient estimators. As a prominent example, we focus on Monte Carlo variational inference (MCVI) in this paper. The performance of MCVI crucially depends on the variance of its stochastic…

We show how to use a variational approximation to the logistic function to perform approximate inference in Bayesian networks containing discrete nodes with continuous parents. Essentially, we convert the logistic function to a Gaussian,…

Multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) is a widely used tool to support decisions in which a set of alternatives should be ranked or classified based on multiple criteria. Recent studies in MCDA have shown the relevance of considering not…

A well known identifiability issue in factor analytic models is the invariance with respect to orthogonal transformations. This problem burdens the inference under a Bayesian setup, where Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are used to…

Solving high-dimensional Bayesian inverse problems (BIPs) with the variational inference (VI) method is promising but still challenging. The main difficulties arise from two aspects. First, VI methods approximate the posterior distribution…

Reconstructing the evolutionary history relating a collection of molecular sequences is the main subject of modern Bayesian phylogenetic inference. However, the commonly used Markov chain Monte Carlo methods can be inefficient due to the…

We describe and analyze a variance reduction approach for Monte Carlo (MC) sampling that accelerates the estimation of statistics of computationally expensive simulation models using an ensemble of models with lower cost. These lower cost…

Leaving posterior sensitivity concerns aside, non-identifiability of the parameters does not raise a difficulty for Bayesian inference as far as the posterior is proper, but multi-modality or flat regions of the posterior induced by the…

Current variational inference methods for hierarchical Bayesian nonparametric models can neither characterize the correlation structure among latent variables due to the mean-field setting, nor infer the true posterior dimension because of…

Domain shift remains a key challenge in deploying machine learning models to the real world. Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to address this by minimising domain discrepancy during training, but the discrepancy estimates suffer…

This paper advocates proximal Markov Chain Monte Carlo (ProxMCMC) as a flexible and general Bayesian inference framework for constrained or regularized estimation. Originally introduced in the Bayesian imaging literature, ProxMCMC employs…

We consider Bayesian variable selection for binary outcomes under a probit link with a spike-and-slab prior on the regression coefficients. Motivated by the computational challenges encountered by Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) samplers in…

Variational inference uses optimization, rather than integration, to approximate the marginal likelihood, and thereby the posterior, in a Bayesian model. Thanks to advances in computational scalability made in the last decade, variational…

The trace of a matrix function f(A), most notably of the matrix inverse, can be estimated stochastically using samples< x,f(A)x> if the components of the random vectors x obey an appropriate probability distribution. However such a…

Many Bayesian inference problems require exploring the posterior distribution of high-dimensional parameters that represent the discretization of an underlying function. This work introduces a family of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)…

In many applications of Bayesian clustering, posterior sampling on the discrete state space of cluster allocations is achieved via Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques. As it is typically challenging to design transition kernels to…

The formulation of Bayesian inverse problems involves choosing prior distributions; choices that seem equally reasonable may lead to significantly different conclusions. We develop a computational approach to better understand the impact of…

This paper introduces a Bayesian framework that combines Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling, dimensionality reduction, and neural density estimation to efficiently handle inverse problems that (i) must be solved multiple times, and…