Related papers: Stochastic Approximation with Biased MCMC for Expe…
Non-homogeneous hidden Markov models (NHHMM) are a subclass of dependent mixture models used for semi-supervised learning, where both transition probabilities between the latent states and mean parameter of the probability distribution of…
Expectation Maximization (EM) is among the most popular algorithms for estimating parameters of statistical models. However, EM, which is an iterative algorithm based on the maximum likelihood principle, is generally only guaranteed to find…
We develop a stochastic approximation-type algorithm to solve finite state/action, infinite-horizon, risk-aware Markov decision processes. Our algorithm has two loops. The inner loop computes the risk by solving a stochastic saddle-point…
Various Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are studied to improve upon random walk Metropolis sampling, for simulation from complex distributions. Examples include Metropolis-adjusted Langevin algorithms, Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, and…
The Metropolis-adjusted Langevin (MALA) algorithm is a sampling algorithm that incorporates the gradient of the logarithm of the target density in its proposal distribution. In an earlier joint work \citet{pill:stu:12}, the author had…
Stochastic approximation Monte Carlo (SAMC) has recently been proposed by Liang, Liu and Carroll [J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 102 (2007) 305--320] as a general simulation and optimization algorithm. In this paper, we propose to improve its…
We explore the performance of sample average approximation in comparison with several other methods for stochastic optimization when there is information available on the underlying true probability distribution. The methods we evaluate are…
Stochastic Gradient (SG) Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms (MCMC) are popular algorithms for Bayesian sampling in the presence of large datasets. However, they come with little theoretical guarantees and assessing their empirical…
The Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm is of key importance for inference in latent variable models including mixture of regressors and experts, missing observations. This paper introduces a novel EM algorithm, called…
We consider a recently proposed class of MCMC methods which uses proximity maps instead of gradients to build proposal mechanisms which can be employed for both differentiable and non-differentiable targets. These methods have been shown to…
We construct a new framework for accelerating Markov chain Monte Carlo in posterior sampling problems where standard methods are limited by the computational cost of the likelihood, or of numerical models embedded therein. Our approach…
Bayesian inference via standard Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods is too computationally intensive to handle large datasets, since the cost per step usually scales like $\Theta(n)$ in the number of data points $n$. We propose the…
The Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm is widely used as an iterative modification to maximum likelihood estimation when the data is incomplete. We focus on a semi-supervised case to learn the model from labeled and unlabeled samples.…
Latent Gaussian processes are widely applied in many fields like, statistics, inverse problems and machine learning. A popular method for inference is through the posterior distribution, which is typically carried out by Markov Chain Monte…
Stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (SG-MCMC) methods are Bayesian analogs to popular stochastic optimization methods; however, this connection is not well studied. We explore this relationship by applying simulated annealing to an…
An efficient, joint transmission delay and channel parameter estimation algorithm is proposed for uplink asynchronous direct-sequence code-division multiple access (DS-CDMA) systems based on the space-alternating generalized expectation…
Mixed linear regression (MLR) model is among the most exemplary statistical tools for modeling non-linear distributions using a mixture of linear models. When the additive noise in MLR model is Gaussian, Expectation-Maximization (EM)…
Bayesian inference for Markov processes has become increasingly relevant in recent years. Problems of this type often have intractable likelihoods and prior knowledge about model rate parameters is often poor. Markov Chain Monte Carlo…
The Metropolis-adjusted Langevin (MALA) algorithm is a sampling algorithm which makes local moves by incorporating information about the gradient of the logarithm of the target density. In this paper we study the efficiency of MALA on a…
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…