Related papers: Sequential Monte Carlo for Cut-Bayesian Posterior …
Recent advances in stochastic gradient variational inference have made it possible to perform variational Bayesian inference with posterior approximations containing auxiliary random variables. This enables us to explore a new synthesis of…
Ill-posed linear inverse problems arise frequently in various applications, from computational photography to medical imaging. A recent line of research exploits Bayesian inference with informative priors to handle the ill-posedness of such…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is the predominant tool used in Bayesian parameter estimation for hierarchical models. When the model expands due to an increasing number of hierarchical levels, number of groups at a particular level, or…
We consider Bayesian inference in sequential latent variable models in general, and in nonlinear state space models in particular (i.e., state smoothing). We work with sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithms, which provide a powerful…
Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) is a widely used inference method in Bayesian statistics to bypass the point-wise computation of the likelihood. In this paper we develop theoretical bounds for the distance between the statistics used…
Simulation Based Calibration (SBC) is applied to analyse two commonly used, competing Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms for estimating the posterior distribution of a stochastic volatility model. In particular, the bespoke 'off-set…
We study Bayesian inversion for a model elliptic PDE with unknown diffusion coefficient. We provide complexity analyses of several Markov Chain-Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods for the efficient numerical evaluation of expectations under the…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a state of the art method for sampling from distributions with differentiable densities, but can converge slowly when applied to challenging multimodal problems. Running HMC with a time varying Hamiltonian,…
Stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms have received much attention in Bayesian computing for big data problems, but they are only applicable to a small class of problems for which the parameter space has a fixed…
In this article we consider a Bayesian inverse problem associated to elliptic partial differential equations (PDEs) in two and three dimensions. This class of inverse problems is important in applications such as hydrology, but the…
Many recent advances in large scale probabilistic inference rely on variational methods. The success of variational approaches depends on (i) formulating a flexible parametric family of distributions, and (ii) optimizing the parameters to…
Optimal decision-making under partial observability requires agents to balance reducing uncertainty (exploration) against pursuing immediate objectives (exploitation). In this paper, we introduce a novel policy optimization framework for…
There is a lack of simple and scalable algorithms for uncertainty quantification. Bayesian methods quantify uncertainty through posterior and predictive distributions, but it is difficult to rapidly estimate summaries of these…
State space models (SSM) have been widely applied for the analysis and visualization of large sequential datasets. Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) is a very popular particle-based method to sample latent states from intractable posteriors.…
This book aims to provide a graduate-level introduction to advanced topics in Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms, as applied broadly in the Bayesian computational context. Most, if not all of these topics (stochastic gradient MCMC,…
An important feature of Bayesian statistics is the opportunity to do sequential inference: the posterior distribution obtained after seeing a dataset can be used as prior for a second inference. However, when Monte Carlo sampling methods…
We introduce Preconditioned Monte Carlo (PMC), a novel Monte Carlo method for Bayesian inference that facilitates efficient sampling of probability distributions with non-trivial geometry. PMC utilises a Normalising Flow (NF) in order to…
ABC (approximate Bayesian computation) is a general approach for dealing with models with an intractable likelihood. In this work, we derive ABC algorithms based on QMC (quasi- Monte Carlo) sequences. We show that the resulting ABC…
We provide a framework which admits a number of ``marginal'' sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithms as particular cases -- including the marginal particle filter [Klaas et al., 2005, in: Proceedings of Uncertainty in Artificial…
We propose a Monte Carlo algorithm to sample from high dimensional probability distributions that combines Markov chain Monte Carlo and importance sampling. We provide a careful theoretical analysis, including guarantees on robustness to…