Related papers: MCMC Importance Sampling via Moreau-Yosida Envelop…
Importance sampling is a Monte Carlo method which designs estimators of expectations under a target distribution using weighted samples from a proposal distribution. When the target distribution is complex, such as multimodal distributions…
We propose a method to efficiently integrate truncated probability densities. The method uses Markov chain Monte Carlo method to sample from a probability density matching the function being integrated. The required normalisation or…
This paper presents a detailed theoretical analysis of the Langevin Monte Carlo sampling algorithm recently introduced in Durmus et al. (Efficient Bayesian computation by proximal Markov chain Monte Carlo: when Langevin meets Moreau, 2016)…
We propose an adaptive importance sampling scheme for Gaussian approximations of intractable posteriors. Optimization-based approximations like variational inference can be too inaccurate while existing Monte Carlo methods can be too slow.…
In many real-world engineering systems, the performance or reliability of the system is characterised by a scalar parameter. The distribution of this performance parameter is important in many uncertainty quantification problems, ranging…
Kernel methods have revolutionized the fields of pattern recognition and machine learning. Their success, however, critically depends on the choice of kernel parameters. Using Gaussian process (GP) classification as a working example, this…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods asymptotically sample from complex probability distributions. The pseudo-marginal MCMC framework only requires an unbiased estimator of the unnormalized probability distribution function to construct…
Bayesian inference with Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is challenging when the likelihood function is irregular and expensive to compute. We explore several sampling algorithms that make use of subset evaluations to reduce computational…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are routinely used to draw samples from distributions with intractable normalization constants. However, standard MCMC algorithms do not apply to doubly-intractable distributions in which there are…
In this paper, we address the challenge of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms within the approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) framework, which often get trapped in local optima due to their inherent local exploration mechanism. We…
Monte Carlo (MC) sampling methods are widely applied in Bayesian inference, system simulation and optimization problems. The Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are a well-known class of MC methods which generate a Markov chain with…
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…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) provides a feasible method for inferring Hidden Markov models, however, it is often computationally prohibitive, especially constrained by the curse of dimensionality, as the Monte Carlo sampler traverses…
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…
This paper concerns the use of Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for posterior sampling in Bayesian nonparametric mixture models with normalized random measure priors. Making use of some recent posterior characterizations for the class of…
Bayesian inference in deep neural networks is challenging due to the high-dimensional, strongly multi-modal parameter posterior density landscape. Markov chain Monte Carlo approaches asymptotically recover the true posterior but are…
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 modelling and computational inference by Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a principled framework for large-scale uncertainty quantification, though is limited in practice by computational cost when implemented in the simplest…
Standard Markov chain Monte Carlo methods struggle to explore distributions that are concentrated in the neighbourhood of low-dimensional structures. These pathologies naturally occur in a number of situations. For example, they are common…
Importance sampling is a Monte Carlo technique for efficiently estimating the likelihood of rare events by biasing the sampling distribution towards the rare event of interest. By drawing weighted samples from a learned proposal…