Related papers: Automatic Parallel Tempering Markov Chain Monte Ca…
In this paper we demonstrate that tempering Markov chain Monte Carlo samplers for Bayesian models by recursively subsampling observations without replacement can improve the performance of baseline samplers in terms of effective sample size…
Bayesian models have become very popular over the last years in several fields such as signal processing, statistics, and machine learning. Bayesian inference requires the approximation of complicated integrals involving posterior…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a well-established family of algorithms primarily used in Bayesian statistics to sample from a target distribution when direct sampling is challenging. Existing work on Bayesian decision trees uses MCMC.…
In the current work we present two generalizations of the Parallel Tempering algorithm, inspired by the so-called continuous-time Infinite Swapping algorithm. Such a method, found its origins in the molecular dynamics community, and can be…
Efficient sampling of many-dimensional and multimodal density functions is a task of great interest in many research fields. We describe an algorithm that allows parallelizing inherently serial Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling by…
Due to the need for robust uncertainty quantification, Bayesian neural learning has gained attention in the era of deep learning and big data. Markov Chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC) methods typically implement Bayesian inference which faces…
This paper proposes a new sampling-based nonlinear model predictive control (MPC) algorithm, with a bound on complexity quadratic in the prediction horizon N and linear in the number of samples. The idea of the proposed algorithm is to use…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods allow to sample a distribution known up to a multiplicative constant. Classical MCMC samplers are known to have very poor mixing properties when sampling multimodal distributions. The Equi-Energy…
Models of biological systems often have many unknown parameters that must be determined in order for model behavior to match experimental observations. Commonly-used methods for parameter estimation that return point estimates of the…
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…
A number of problems in a variety of fields are characterised by target distributions with a multimodal structure in which the presence of several isolated local maxima dramatically reduces the efficiency of Markov Chain Monte Carlo…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods such as Gibbs sampling are finding widespread use in applied statistics and machine learning. These often lead to difficult computational problems, which are increasingly being solved on parallel and…
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…
Bayesian neural learning feature a rigorous approach to estimation and uncertainty quantification via the posterior distribution of weights that represent knowledge of the neural network. This not only provides point estimates of optimal…
We introduce a new class of sequential Monte Carlo methods which reformulates the essence of the nested sampling method of Skilling (2006) in terms of sequential Monte Carlo techniques. Two new algorithms are proposed, nested sampling via…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a powerful Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method for performing approximate inference in complex probabilistic models of continuous variables. In common with many MCMC methods, however, the standard HMC…
It has become increasingly easy nowadays to collect approximate posterior samples via fast algorithms such as variational Bayes, but concerns exist about the estimation accuracy. It is tempting to build solutions that exploit approximate…
Existing Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are either based on general-purpose and domain-agnostic schemes which can lead to slow convergence, or hand-crafting of problem-specific proposals by an expert. We propose A-NICE-MC, a novel…
In performing a Bayesian analysis, two difficult problems often emerge. First, in estimating the parameters of some model for the data, the resulting posterior distribution may be multi-modal or exhibit pronounced (curving) degeneracies.…
Informed Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have been proposed as scalable solutions to Bayesian posterior computation on high-dimensional discrete state spaces, but theoretical results about their convergence behavior in general…