Related papers: Learning Distributions via Monte-Carlo Marginaliza…
We provide a general methodology for unbiased estimation for intractable stochastic models. We consider situations where the target distribution can be written as an appropriate limit of distributions, and where conventional approaches…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo is a widely used algorithm for sampling from posterior distributions of complex Bayesian models. It can efficiently explore high-dimensional parameter spaces guided by simulated Hamiltonian flows. However, the…
This paper studies distributed Bayesian learning in a setting encompassing a central server and multiple workers by focusing on the problem of mitigating the impact of stragglers. The standard one-shot, or embarrassingly parallel, Bayesian…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are widely used to sample from complicated distributions, especially to sample from the posterior distribution in Bayesian inference. However, MCMC is not directly applicable when facing the doubly…
We revisit the classical problem of estimating an unknown distribution from its samples by fitting a mixture model that minimizes cross-entropy loss. Framing the task as a stochastic convex optimization problem over the space of $ M…
A statistical learning approach for parametric PDEs related to Uncertainty Quantification is derived. The method is based on the minimization of an empirical risk on a selected model class and it is shown to be applicable to a broad range…
We focus on generative autoencoders, such as variational or adversarial autoencoders, which jointly learn a generative model alongside an inference model. Generative autoencoders are those which are trained to softly enforce a prior on the…
In machine learning and statistics, probabilistic inference involving multimodal distributions is quite difficult. This is especially true in high dimensional problems, where most existing algorithms cannot easily move from one mode to…
Deriving Bayesian inference for exponential random graph models (ERGMs) is a challenging "doubly intractable" problem as the normalizing constants of the likelihood and posterior density are both intractable. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)…
Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are popular likelihood-based generative models which can be efficiently trained by maximizing an Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO). There has been much progress in improving the expressiveness of the variational…
In this paper, we study the problem of learning multi-dimensional Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs), with a specific focus on model order selection and efficient mixing distribution estimation. We first establish an information-theoretic lower…
Sampling from log-concave distributions is a well researched problem that has many applications in statistics and machine learning. We study the distributions of the form $p^{*}\propto\exp(-f(x))$, where…
This paper introduces a class of Monte Carlo algorithms which are based upon the simulation of a Markov process whose quasi-stationary distribution coincides with a distribution of interest. This differs fundamentally from, say, current…
In many real-world engineering systems, the performance or reliability of the system is characterised by a scalar parameter. The distribution of this performance parameter is important in many uncertainty quantification problems, ranging…
We demonstrate the use of a variational method to determine a quantitative lower bound on the rate of convergence of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms as a function of the target density and proposal density. The bound relies on…
Bayesian learning in undirected graphical models|computing posterior distributions over parameters and predictive quantities is exceptionally difficult. We conjecture that for general undirected models, there are no tractable MCMC (Markov…
We propose a generic approach for numerically efficient simulation from analytically intractable distributions with constrained support. Our approach relies upon Generalized Randomized Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (GRHMC) processes and combines…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) has been progressively incorporated within the statistician's toolbox as an alternative sampling method in settings when standard Metropolis-Hastings is inefficient. HMC generates a Markov chain on an augmented…
Doubly intractable distributions arise in many settings, for example in Markov models for point processes and exponential random graph models for networks. Bayesian inference for these models is challenging because they involve intractable…
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…