Related papers: Bayesian Decision Trees Inspired from Evolutionary…
In this paper, we propose a new stochastic optimization algorithm for Bayesian inference based on multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) methods. In Bayesian statistics, biased estimators of the model evidence have been often used as stochastic…
Bayesian optimization (BO) is a class of popular methods for expensive black-box optimization, and has been widely applied to many scenarios. However, BO suffers from the curse of dimensionality, and scaling it to high-dimensional problems…
Monte Carlo Tree Search is a popular method for solving decision making problems. Faster implementations allow for more simulations within the same wall clock time, directly improving search performance. To this end, we present an…
Stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (SG-MCMC) has become increasingly popular for simulating posterior samples in large-scale Bayesian modeling. However, existing SG-MCMC schemes are not tailored to any specific probabilistic…
Bayes-optimal behavior, while well-defined, is often difficult to achieve. Recent advances in the use of Monte-Carlo tree search (MCTS) have shown that it is possible to act near-optimally in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with very large…
Based on decision trees, many fields have arguably made tremendous progress in recent years. In simple words, decision trees use the strategy of "divide-and-conquer" to divide the complex problem on the dependency between input features and…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are ubiquitous in Bayesian computations. However, they need to access the full data set in order to evaluate the posterior density at every step of the algorithm. This results in a great…
This paper introduces a framework for speeding up Bayesian inference conducted in presence of large datasets. We design a Markov chain whose transition kernel uses an (unknown) fraction of (fixed size) of the available data that is randomly…
Many scientific and engineering problems require to perform Bayesian inferences in function spaces, in which the unknowns are of infinite dimension. In such problems, many standard Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms become arbitrary…
New machine learning based algorithms have been developed and tested for Monte Carlo integration based on generative Boosted Decision Trees and Deep Neural Networks. Both of these algorithms exhibit substantial improvements compared to…
Standard planners for sequential decision making (including Monte Carlo planning, tree search, dynamic programming, etc.) are constrained by an implicit sequential planning assumption: The order in which a plan is constructed is the same in…
Bayesian analyses combine information represented by different terms in a joint Bayesian model. When one or more of the terms is misspecified, it can be helpful to restrict the use of information from suspect model components to modify…
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…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have revolutionised Bayesian data analysis over the years by making the direct computation of posterior probability densities feasible on modern workstations. However, the calculation of the prior…
Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is a sampling best-first method to search for optimal decisions. The success of MCTS depends heavily on how the MCTS statistical tree is built and the selection policy plays a fundamental role in this. A…
Brute force cross-validation (CV) is a method for predictive assessment and model selection that is general and applicable to a wide range of Bayesian models. Naive or `brute force' CV approaches are often too computationally costly for…
Recent advances demonstrate that increasing inference-time computation can significantly boost the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Although repeated sampling (i.e., generating multiple candidate outputs) is a highly…
Classical parameter-space Bayesian inference for Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) suffers from several unresolved prior issues, such as knowledge encoding intractability and pathological behaviours in deep networks, which can lead to…
Standard MCMC methods can scale poorly to big data settings due to the need to evaluate the likelihood at each iteration. There have been a number of approximate MCMC algorithms that use sub-sampling ideas to reduce this computational…
Variable selection is a key issue when analyzing high-dimensional data. The explosion of data with large sample sizes and dimensionality brings new challenges to this problem in both inference accuracy and computational complexity. To…