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Models with intractable likelihood functions arise in areas including network analysis and spatial statistics, especially those involving Gibbs random fields. Posterior parameter es timation in these settings is termed a doubly-intractable…

Computation · Statistics 2018-10-16 Lampros Bouranis , Nial Friel , Florian Maire

Bayesian synthetic likelihood (BSL) is now a well established method for performing approximate Bayesian parameter estimation for simulation-based models that do not possess a tractable likelihood function. BSL approximates an intractable…

Computation · Statistics 2019-10-04 Ziwen An , David J. Nott , Christopher Drovandi

We consider Bayesian inference by importance sampling when the likelihood is analytically intractable but can be unbiasedly estimated. We refer to this procedure as importance sampling squared (IS2), as we can often estimate the likelihood…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-07-26 Minh-Ngoc Tran , Marcel Scharth , Michael K. Pitt , Robert Kohn

Bayesian inference for complex models with an intractable likelihood can be tackled using algorithms performing many calls to computer simulators. These approaches are collectively known as "simulation-based inference" (SBI). Recent SBI…

Sum-product networks (SPNs) are probabilistic models characterized by exact and fast evaluation of fundamental probabilistic operations. Its superior computational tractability has led to applications in many fields, such as machine…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-19 Soma Yokoi , Issei Sato

Bayesian inverse problems use data to update a prior probability distribution on uncertain parameter values to a posterior distribution. Such problems arise in many structural engineering applications, but computational solution of Bayesian…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-05-26 Jakob Scheffels , Elizabeth Qian , Iason Papaioannou , Elisabeth Ullmann

Optimization is widely used in statistics, and often efficiently delivers point estimates on useful spaces involving structural constraints or combinatorial structure. To quantify uncertainty, Gibbs posterior exponentiates the negative loss…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-07-23 Cheng Zeng , Eleni Dilma , Jason Xu , Leo L Duan

Nested error regression models are useful tools for analysis of grouped data, especially in the case of small area estimation. This paper suggests a nested error regression model using uncertain random effects in which the random effect in…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-02-28 Shonosuke Sugasawa , Tatsuya Kubokawa

Bayesian likelihood-free methods implement Bayesian inference using simulation of data from the model to substitute for intractable likelihood evaluations. Most likelihood-free inference methods replace the full data set with a summary…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-10-16 Yinan Mao , Xueou Wang , David J. Nott , Michael Evans

Posterior sampling with the spike-and-slab prior [MB88], a popular multimodal distribution used to model uncertainty in variable selection, is considered the theoretical gold standard method for Bayesian sparse linear regression [CPS09,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-05 Syamantak Kumar , Purnamrita Sarkar , Kevin Tian , Yusong Zhu

An important task of uncertainty quantification is to identify {the probability of} undesired events, in particular, system failures, caused by various sources of uncertainties. In this work we consider the construction of Gaussian…

Computation · Statistics 2016-04-20 Hongqiao Wang , Guang Lin , Jinglai Li

Design of experiments has traditionally relied on the frequentist hypothesis testing framework where the optimal size of the experiment is specified as the minimum sample size that guarantees a required level of power. Sample size…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-08-07 Shirin Golchi , Luke Hagar

In inverse problems, the parameters of a model are estimated based on observations of the model response. The Bayesian approach is powerful for solving such problems; one formulates a prior distribution for the parameter state that is…

Computation · Statistics 2022-06-08 Max Ehre , Rafael Flock , Martin Fußeder , Iason Papaioannou , Daniel Straub

Computer experiments are becoming increasingly important in scientific investigations. In the presence of uncertainty, analysts employ probabilistic sensitivity methods to identify the key-drivers of change in the quantities of interest.…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-07-02 Isadora Antoniano-Villalobos , Emanuele Borgonovo , Xuefei Lu

Robust Bayesian analysis has been mainly devoted to detecting and measuring robustness w.r.t. the prior distribution. Many contributions in the literature aim to define suitable classes of priors which allow the computation of variations of…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-09-04 Antonio Di Noia , Fabrizio Ruggeri , Antonietta Mira

Comparison of appropriate models to describe observational data is a fundamental task of science. The Bayesian model evidence, or marginal likelihood, is a computationally challenging, yet crucial, quantity to estimate to perform Bayesian…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2023-11-10 A. Spurio Mancini , M. M. Docherty , M. A. Price , J. D. McEwen

Bayesian inference involves two main computational challenges. First, in estimating the parameters of some model for the data, the posterior distribution may well be highly multi-modal: a regime in which the convergence to stationarity of…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2019-12-10 F. Feroz , M. P. Hobson , E. Cameron , A. N. Pettitt

Many statistical applications involve models for which it is difficult to evaluate the likelihood, but from which it is relatively easy to sample. Approximate Bayesian computation is a likelihood-free method for implementing Bayesian…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-11-29 Wentao Li , Paul Fearnhead

We propose a novel approach to Bayesian analysis that is provably robust to outliers in the data and often has computational advantages over standard methods. Our technique is based on splitting the data into non-overlapping subgroups,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2016-06-03 Stanislav Minsker , Sanvesh Srivastava , Lizhen Lin , David B. Dunson

Using observation data to estimate unknown parameters in computational models is broadly important. This task is often challenging because solutions are non-unique due to the complexity of the model and limited observation data. However,…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-12-18 Jiacheng Wu , Jian-Xun Wang , Shawn C. Shadden