Related papers: Inference of Probabilistic Programs with Moment-Ma…
We present a new symbolic execution semantics of probabilistic programs that include observe statements and sampling from continuous distributions. Building on Kozen's seminal work, this symbolic semantics consists of a countable collection…
We introduce a new concept of approximation applicable to decision problems and functions, inspired by Bayesian probability. From the perspective of a Bayesian reasoner with limited computational resources, the answer to a problem that…
We develop in this work a numerical method for stochastic differential equations (SDEs) with weak second order accuracy based on Gaussian mixture. Unlike the conventional higher order schemes for SDEs based on It\^o-Taylor expansion and…
Statistical and machine-learning algorithms are frequently applied to high-dimensional data. In many of these applications data is scarce, and often much more costly than computation time. We provide the first sample-efficient…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) methods see many uses in optimization problems. Modifications to the algorithm, such as momentum-based SGD methods have been known to produce better results in certain cases. Much of this, however, is due…
We provide methods for in-database support of decision making under uncertainty. Many important decision problems correspond to selecting a package (bag of tuples in a relational database) that jointly satisfy a set of constraints while…
Probabilistic Logic Programs (PLPs) generalize traditional logic programs and allow the encoding of models combining logical structure and uncertainty. In PLP, inference is performed by summarizing the possible worlds which entail the query…
The Bayesian smoothing equations are generally intractable for systems described by nonlinear stochastic differential equations and discrete-time measurements. Gaussian approximations are a computationally efficient way to approximate the…
Current work in lexical distributed representations maps each word to a point vector in low-dimensional space. Mapping instead to a density provides many interesting advantages, including better capturing uncertainty about a representation…
To model combinatorial decision problems involving uncertainty and probability, we introduce stochastic constraint programming. Stochastic constraint programs contain both decision variables (which we can set) and stochastic variables…
We give a new algorithm for learning mixtures of $k$ Gaussians (with identity covariance in $\mathbb{R}^n$) to TV error $\varepsilon$, with quasi-polynomial ($O(n^{\text{poly\,log}\left(\frac{n+k}{\varepsilon}\right)})$) time and sample…
We introduce and study the computational problem of determining statistical similarity between probability distributions. For distributions $P$ and $Q$ over a finite sample space, their statistical similarity is defined as…
In this paper we study the problem of model reduction by moment matching for stochastic systems. We characterize the mathematical object which generalizes the notion of moment to stochastic differential equations and we find a class of…
This survey provides an exposition of a suite of techniques based on the theory of polynomials, collectively referred to as polynomial methods, which have recently been applied to address several challenging problems in statistical…
Probabilistic Logic Programming is an effective formalism for encoding problems characterized by uncertainty. Some of these problems may require the optimization of probability values subject to constraints among probability distributions…
Parameter identification problems are formulated in a probabilistic language, where the randomness reflects the uncertainty about the knowledge of the true values. This setting allows conceptually easily to incorporate new information, e.g.…
A new algorithm is developed to tackle the issue of sampling non-Gaussian model parameter posterior probability distributions that arise from solutions to Bayesian inverse problems. The algorithm aims to mitigate some of the hurdles faced…
We provide a numerical scheme to approximate as closely as desired the Gaussian or exponential measure $\mu(\om)$ of (not necessarily compact) basic semi-algebraic sets$\om\subset\R^n$. We obtain two monotone (non increasing and non…
We study the foundations of variational inference, which frames posterior inference as an optimisation problem, for probabilistic programming. The dominant approach for optimisation in practice is stochastic gradient descent. In particular,…
The entropy computation of Gaussian mixture distributions with a large number of components has a prohibitive computational complexity. In this paper, we propose a novel approach exploiting the sphere decoding concept to bound and…