Related papers: Notes on the Practical Application of Nested Sampl…

The posterior probability distribution for a set of model parameters encodes all that the data have to tell us in the context of a given model; it is the fundamental quantity for Bayesian parameter estimation. In order to infer the…

Scientific claims gain credibility by replicability, especially if replication under different circumstances and varying designs yields equivalent results. Aggregating results over multiple studies is, however, not straightforward, and when…

In real-world Bayesian inference applications, prior assumptions regarding the parameters of interest may be unrepresentative of their actual values for a given dataset. In particular, if the likelihood is concentrated far out in the wings…

Mixture models provide a flexible representation of heterogeneity in a finite number of latent classes. From the Bayesian point of view, Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods provide a way to draw inferences from these models. In particular,…

For several decades now, Bayesian inference techniques have been applied to theories of particle physics, cosmology and astrophysics to obtain the probability density functions of their free parameters. In this study, we review and compare…

We review Skilling's nested sampling (NS) algorithm for Bayesian inference and more broadly multi-dimensional integration. After recapitulating the principles of NS, we survey developments in implementing efficient NS algorithms in practice…

When working with multimodal Bayesian posterior distributions, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms have difficulty moving between modes, and default variational or mode-based approximate inferences will understate posterior…

The main idea of nested sampling is to substitute the high-dimensional likelihood integral over the parameter space $\Omega$ by an integral over the unit line $[0,1]$ by employing a push-forward with respect to a suitable transformation.…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have not been broadly adopted in Bayesian neural networks (BNNs). This paper initially reviews the main challenges in sampling from the parameter posterior of a neural network via MCMC. Such…

Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) have received an increased interest in the last years. In BNNs, a complete posterior distribution of the unknown weight and bias parameters of the network is produced during the training stage. This…

Proximal nested sampling was introduced recently to open up Bayesian model selection for high-dimensional problems such as computational imaging. The framework is suitable for models with a log-convex likelihood, which are ubiquitous in the…

Multi-scale problems, where variables of interest evolve in different time-scales and live in different state-spaces, can be found in many fields of science. Here, we introduce a new recursive methodology for Bayesian inference that aims at…

Many problems in machine learning and statistics involve nested expectations and thus do not permit conventional Monte Carlo (MC) estimation. For such problems, one must nest estimators, such that terms in an outer estimator themselves…

Astronomers are often confronted with funky populations and distributions of objects: brighter objects are more likely to be detected; targets are selected based on colour cuts; imperfect classification yields impure samples. Failing to…

Multilevel linear models allow flexible statistical modelling of complex data with different levels of stratification. Identifying the most appropriate model from the large set of possible candidates is a challenging problem. In the…

Sampling errors in nested sampling parameter estimation differ from those in Bayesian evidence calculation, but have been little studied in the literature. This paper provides the first explanation of the two main sources of sampling errors…

Recent developments in parallel Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms allow us to run thousands of chains almost as quickly as a single chain, using hardware accelerators such as GPUs. While each chain still needs to forget its initial…

UltraNest is a general-purpose Bayesian inference package for parameter estimation and model comparison. It allows fitting arbitrary models specified as likelihood functions written in Python, C, C++, Fortran, Julia or R. With a focus on…

This paper considers the challenging computational task of estimating nested expectations. Existing algorithms, such as nested Monte Carlo or multilevel Monte Carlo, are known to be consistent but require a large number of samples at both…

Using Markov chain Monte Carlo to sample from posterior distributions was the key innovation which made Bayesian data analysis practical. Notoriously, however, MCMC is hard to tune, hard to diagnose, and hard to parallelize. This…