Related papers: APES: Approximate Posterior Ensemble Sampler

The availability of data sets with large numbers of variables is rapidly increasing. The effective application of Bayesian variable selection methods for regression with these data sets has proved difficult since available Markov chain…

In many inference problems, the evaluation of complex and costly models is often required. In this context, Bayesian methods have become very popular in several fields over the last years, in order to obtain parameter inversion, model…

Bayesian inference for doubly-intractable pairwise exponential graphical models typically involves variations of the exchange algorithm or approximate Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) samplers. However, existing methods for both classes of…

Approximate Bayesian computation methods can be used to evaluate posterior distributions without having to calculate likelihoods. In this paper we discuss and apply an approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) method based on sequential Monte…

Adaptive importance sampling (AIS) methods are increasingly used for the approximation of distributions and related intractable integrals in the context of Bayesian inference. Population Monte Carlo (PMC) algorithms are a subclass of AIS…

Bayesian inference for exponential family random graph models (ERGMs) is a doubly-intractable problem because of the intractability of both the likelihood and posterior normalizing factor. Auxiliary variable based Markov Chain Monte Carlo…

The simulation of diffusion-based molecular communication systems with absorbing receivers often requires a high computational complexity to produce accurate results. In this work, a new a priori Monte Carlo (APMC) algorithm is proposed to…

We propose a novel approximate inference algorithm that approximates a target distribution by amortising the dynamics of a user-selected MCMC sampler. The idea is to initialise MCMC using samples from an approximation network, apply the…

A Kernel Adaptive Metropolis-Hastings algorithm is introduced, for the purpose of sampling from a target distribution with strongly nonlinear support. The algorithm embeds the trajectory of the Markov chain into a reproducing kernel Hilbert…

Solving partial differential equations (PDEs) is a central task in scientific computing. Recently, neural network approximation of PDEs has received increasing attention due to its flexible meshless discretization and its potential for…

To infer the parameters of mechanistic models with intractable likelihoods, techniques such as approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) are increasingly being adopted. One of the main disadvantages of ABC in practical situations, however, is…

Solving inverse problems in imaging requires models that support efficient inference, uncertainty quantification, and principled probabilistic reasoning. Energy-Based Models (EBMs), with their interpretable energy landscapes and…

We derive the optimal proposal density for Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) using Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) (or Population Monte Carlo, PMC). The criterion for optimality is that the SMC/PMC-ABC sampler maximise the effective…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a powerful methodology for the approximation of posterior distributions. However, the iterative nature of MCMC does not naturally facilitate its use with modern highly parallel computation on HPC and cloud…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods require a large number of samples to approximate a posterior distribution, which can be costly when the likelihood or prior is expensive to evaluate. The number of samples can be reduced if we can…

Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) methods are applicable to statistical models specified by generative processes with analytically intractable likelihoods. These methods try to approximate the posterior density of a model parameter by…

Bayesian inference for factorial hidden Markov models is challenging due to the exponentially sized latent variable space. Standard Monte Carlo samplers can have difficulties effectively exploring the posterior landscape and are often…

In this work, we examine sampling problems with non-smooth potentials. We propose a novel Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm for sampling from non-smooth potentials. We provide a non-asymptotical analysis of our algorithm and establish a…

Posterior sampling is a task of central importance in Bayesian inference. For many applications in Bayesian meta-analysis and Bayesian transfer learning, the prior distribution is unknown and needs to be estimated from samples. In practice,…

This Chapter, "ABC Samplers", is to appear in the forthcoming Handbook of Approximate Bayesian Computation (2018). It details the main ideas and algorithms used to sample from the ABC approximation to the posterior distribution, including…