Related papers: Advancing calibration for stochastic agent-based m…
Current state-of-the-art optimizers are adaptive gradient-based optimization methods such as Adam. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in formulating gradient-based optimizers in a probabilistic framework for better modeling the…
Parameter calibration is a significant challenge in agent-based modelling and simulation (ABMS). An agent-based model's (ABM) complexity grows as the number of parameters required to be calibrated increases. This parameter expansion leads…
Stochastic natural gradient variational inference (NGVI) is a popular and efficient algorithm for Bayesian inference. Despite empirical success, the convergence of this method is still not fully understood. In this work, we define and study…
Amortized variational inference (AVI) replaces instance-specific local inference with a global inference network. While AVI has enabled efficient training of deep generative models such as variational autoencoders (VAE), recent empirical…
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…
Microsimulation models (MSMs) are used to predict population-level effects of health care policies by simulating individual-level outcomes. Simulated outcomes are governed by unknown parameters that are chosen so that the model accurately…
We consider the problem of calibrating an imperfect computer model using experimental data. To compensate the misspecification of the computer model and make more accurate predictions, a discrepancy function is often included and modeled…
Many machine learning problems involve Monte Carlo gradient estimators. As a prominent example, we focus on Monte Carlo variational inference (MCVI) in this paper. The performance of MCVI crucially depends on the variance of its stochastic…
We tackle limitations of ordinary differential equation-driven Susceptible-Infections-Removed (SIR) models and their extensions that have recently be employed for epidemic nowcasting and forecasting. In particular, we deal with challenges…
Stochastic gradient MCMC (SGMCMC) offers a scalable alternative to traditional MCMC, by constructing an unbiased estimate of the gradient of the log-posterior with a small, uniformly-weighted subsample of the data. While efficient to…
Stein variational gradient decent (SVGD) has been shown to be a powerful approximate inference algorithm for complex distributions. However, the standard SVGD requires calculating the gradient of the target density and cannot be applied…
Recent advances in healthcare technologies have led to the availability of large amounts of biological samples across several techniques and applications. In particular, in the last few years, Raman spectroscopy analysis of biological…
Variational inference is a fast and scalable alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo and has been widely applied to posterior inference tasks in statistics and machine learning. A traditional approach for implementing mean-field variational…
It is now widely accepted that knowledge can be acquired from networks by clustering their vertices according to connection profiles. Many methods have been proposed and in this paper we concentrate on the Stochastic Block Model (SBM). The…
State estimation in robotic systems presents significant challenges, particularly due to the prevalence of multimodal posterior distributions in real-world scenarios. One effective strategy for handling such complexity is to compute maximum…
Stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (SG-MCMC) methods are Bayesian analogs to popular stochastic optimization methods; however, this connection is not well studied. We explore this relationship by applying simulated annealing to an…
One of the core problems of modern statistics is to approximate difficult-to-compute probability densities. This problem is especially important in Bayesian statistics, which frames all inference about unknown quantities as a calculation…
Variational inference is a scalable technique for approximate Bayesian inference. Deriving variational inference algorithms requires tedious model-specific calculations; this makes it difficult to automate. We propose an automatic…
Estimating latent epidemic states and model parameters from partially observed, noisy data remains a major challenge in infectious disease modeling. State-space formulations provide a coherent probabilistic framework for such inference, yet…
Stochastic epidemic models provide an interpretable probabilistic description of the spread of a disease through a population. Yet, fitting these models to partially observed data is a notoriously difficult task due to intractability of the…