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Many problems in the physical sciences, machine learning, and statistical inference necessitate sampling from a high-dimensional, multi-modal probability distribution. Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms, the ubiquitous tool for this…
The Dirichlet process (DP) is a fundamental mathematical tool for Bayesian nonparametric modeling, and is widely used in tasks such as density estimation, natural language processing, and time series modeling. Although MCMC inference…
Probabilistic models are conceptually powerful tools for finding structure in data, but their practical effectiveness is often limited by our ability to perform inference in them. Exact inference is frequently intractable, so approximate…
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…
We present a novel Bayesian inference tool that uses a neural network to parameterise efficient Markov Chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC) proposals. The target distribution is first transformed into a diagonal, unit variance Gaussian by a series of…
Bayesian inverse problems often involve sampling posterior distributions on infinite-dimensional function spaces. Traditional Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are characterized by deteriorating mixing times upon mesh-refinement,…
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…
Recent developments in big data and analytics research have produced an abundance of large data sets that are too big to be analyzed in their entirety, due to limits on computer memory or storage capacity. To address these issues,…
Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms are used to simulate from complex statistical distributions by way of a local exploration of these distributions. This local feature avoids heavy requests on understanding the nature of the target, but it…
Restricted Boltzmann Machines are simple and powerful generative models that can encode any complex dataset. Despite all their advantages, in practice the trainings are often unstable and it is difficult to assess their quality because the…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms have become powerful tools for Bayesian inference. However, they do not scale well to large-data problems. Divide-and-conquer strategies, which split the data into batches and, for each batch, run…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have become a cornerstone of many modern scientific analyses by providing a straightforward approach to numerically estimate uncertainties in the parameters of a model using a sequence of random…
We develop a novel Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method that exploits a hierarchy of models of increasing complexity to efficiently generate samples from an unnormalized target distribution. Broadly, the method rewrites the Multilevel…
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…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are often used in clustering since they guarantee asymptotically exact expectations in the infinite-time limit. In finite time, though, slow mixing often leads to poor performance. Modern computing…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a sampling-based method for estimating features of probability distributions. MCMC methods produce a serially correlated, yet representative, sample from the desired distribution. As such it can be…
In Monte-Carlo methods the Markov processes used to sample a given target distribution usually satisfy detailed balance, i.e. they are time-reversible. However, relatively recent results have demonstrated that appropriate reversible and…
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 propose a generic Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm to speed up computations for datasets with many observations. A key feature of our approach is the use of the highly efficient difference estimator from the survey sampling…
Variable selection is a key issue when analyzing high-dimensional data. The explosion of data with large sample sizes and dimensionality brings new challenges to this problem in both inference accuracy and computational complexity. To…