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By formulating the inverse problem of partial differential equations (PDEs) as a statistical inference problem, the Bayesian approach provides a general framework for quantifying uncertainties. In the inverse problem of PDEs, parameters are…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-02-10 Haoyu Lu , Junxiong Jia , Deyu Meng

Most applications of Bayesian Inference for parameter estimation and model selection in astrophysics involve the use of Monte Carlo techniques such as Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and nested sampling. However, these techniques are time…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2022-01-26 Geetakrishnasai Gunapati , Anirudh Jain , P. K. Srijith , Shantanu Desai

The t-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE) is a powerful and popular method for visualizing high-dimensional data. It minimizes the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between the original and embedded data distributions. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-06 Daniel Jiwoong Im , Nakul Verma , Kristin Branson

Recent work has attempted to directly approximate the `function-space' or predictive posterior distribution of Bayesian models, without approximating the posterior distribution over the parameters. This is appealing in e.g. Bayesian neural…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-11-19 David R. Burt , Sebastian W. Ober , Adrià Garriga-Alonso , Mark van der Wilk

This paper introduces a Bayesian framework that combines Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling, dimensionality reduction, and neural density estimation to efficiently handle inverse problems that (i) must be solved multiple times, and…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Giacomo Bottacini , Matteo Torzoni , Andrea Manzoni

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…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2013-05-29 Fergal P. Casey , Joshua J. Waterfall , Ryan N. Gutenkunst , Christopher R. Myers , James P. Sethna

Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC), or particle filtering, is widely used in nonlinear state-space systems, but its performance often suffers from poorly approximated proposal and state-transition distributions. This work introduces a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Wessel L. van Nierop , Nir Shlezinger , Ruud J. G. van Sloun

One of the challenges in training generative models such as the variational auto encoder (VAE) is avoiding posterior collapse. When the generator has too much capacity, it is prone to ignoring latent code. This problem is exacerbated when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-30 Talip Ucar

Neyman-Scott processes (NSPs) have been applied across a range of fields to model points or temporal events with a hierarchy of clusters. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is typically used for posterior sampling in the model. However, MCMC's…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-03-08 Chengkuan Hong , Christian R. Shelton

Monte Carlo (MC) integration is the de facto method for approximating the predictive distribution of Bayesian neural networks (BNNs). But, even with many MC samples, Gaussian-based BNNs could still yield bad predictive performance due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-18 Agustinus Kristiadi , Runa Eschenhagen , Philipp Hennig

Importance Sampling (IS), an effective variance reduction strategy in Monte Carlo (MC) simulation, is frequently utilized for Bayesian inference and other statistical challenges. Quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) replaces the random samples in MC…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2024-03-19 Zhijian He , Hejin Wang , Xiaoqun Wang

Estimating the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between two distributions given samples from them is well-studied in machine learning and information theory. Motivated by considerations of multi-group fairness, we seek KL divergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-01 Parikshit Gopalan , Nina Narodytska , Omer Reingold , Vatsal Sharan , Udi Wieder

Continual learning (CL) is crucial for the adaptation of neural network models to new environments. Although outperforming weight-space regularisation approaches, the functional regularisation-based CL methods suffer from high computational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Pengcheng Hao , Menghao Waiyan William Zhu , Ercan Engin Kuruoglu

Understanding stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants is essential for machine learning. However, most of the preceding analyses are conducted under amenable conditions such as unbiased gradient estimator and bounded objective…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-26 Tianyou Li , Fan Chen , Huajie Chen , Zaiwen Wen

Training neural samplers directly from unnormalized densities without access to target distribution samples presents a significant challenge. A critical desideratum in these settings is achieving comprehensive mode coverage, ensuring the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Chenguang Wang , Xiaoyu Zhang , Kaiyuan Cui , Weichen Zhao , Yongtao Guan , Tianshu Yu

In this paper, we design a novel algorithm based on Least-Squares Monte Carlo (LSMC) in order to approximate the solution of discrete time Backward Stochastic Differential Equations (BSDEs). Our algorithm allows massive parallelization of…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2024-08-01 E. Gobet , J. G. López-Salas , P. Turkedjiev , C. Vázquez

Particle-based methods include a variety of techniques, such as Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC), for approximating a probabilistic target distribution with a set of weighted particles. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-12-03 Hadi Mohasel Afshar , Gilad Francis , Sally Cripps

The multivariate extended skew-normal distribution allows for accommodating raw data which are skewed and heavy tailed, and has at least three appealing statistical properties, namely closure under conditioning, affine transformations, and…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-06-19 Mathieu Gerber , Florian Pelgrin

This paper illustrates novel methods for nonstationary time series modeling along with their applications to selected problems in neuroscience. These methods are semi-parametric in that inferences are derived by combining sequential…

Applications · Statistics 2010-11-03 Fabio Rigat , Jim Q. Smith

The max-log-map (MLM) receiver is an approximated version of the well-known, Bahl-Cocke-Jelinek-Raviv (BCJR) algorithm. The MLM algorithm is attractive due to its implementation simplicity. In practice, sliding-window implementations are…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2013-04-12 Fabian Lim , Aleksandar Kavcic