Related papers: Stacking Variational Bayesian Monte Carlo

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…

This work introduces a Bayesian methodology for fitting large discrete graphical models with spike-and-slab priors to encode sparsity. We consider a quasi-likelihood approach that enables node-wise parallel computation resulting in reduced…

Bayesian analysis often concerns an evaluation of models with different dimensionality as is necessary in, for example, model selection or mixture models. To facilitate this evaluation, transdimensional Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)…

For big data analysis, high computational cost for Bayesian methods often limits their applications in practice. In recent years, there have been many attempts to improve computational efficiency of Bayesian inference. Here we propose an…

Variational Inference (VI) is a method that approximates a difficult-to-compute posterior density using better behaved distributional families. VI is an alternative to the already well-studied Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method of…

Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) is a useful class of methods for Bayesian inference when the likelihood function is computationally intractable. In practice, the basic ABC algorithm may be inefficient in the presence of discrepancy…

In this article we consider Bayesian estimation of static parameters for a class of partially observed McKean-Vlasov diffusion processes with discrete-time observations over a fixed time interval. This problem features several obstacles to…

By formulating the inverse problem of partial differential equations (PDEs) as a statistical inference problem, the Bayesian approach provides a general framework for quantifying uncertainties. In the inverse problem of PDEs, parameters are…

Gradient-based Monte Carlo sampling algorithms, like Langevin dynamics and Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, are important methods for Bayesian inference. In large-scale settings, full-gradients are not affordable and thus stochastic gradients…

Sampling from posterior distributions using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods can require an exhaustive number of iterations, particularly when the posterior is multi-modal as the MCMC sampler can become trapped in a local mode for a…

Leaving posterior sensitivity concerns aside, non-identifiability of the parameters does not raise a difficulty for Bayesian inference as far as the posterior is proper, but multi-modality or flat regions of the posterior induced by the…

Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) is a class of Bayesian inference algorithms that targets for problems with intractable or {unavailable} likelihood function. It uses synthetic data drawn from the simulation model to approximate the…

In cohort studies binary outcomes are very often analyzed by logistic regression. However, it is well-known that when the goal is to estimate a risk ratio, the logistic regression is inappropriate if the outcome is common. In these cases, a…

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…

Parametric verification of linear temporal properties for stochastic models can be expressed as computing the satisfaction probability of a certain property as a function of the parameters of the model. Smoothed model checking (smMC) aims…

Discrete data are abundant and often arise as counts or rounded data. These data commonly exhibit complex distributional features such as zero-inflation, over-/under-dispersion, boundedness, and heaping, which render many parametric models…

In online clustering problems, there is often a large amount of uncertainty over possible cluster assignments that cannot be resolved until more data are observed. This difficulty is compounded when clusters follow complex distributions, as…

Variational Bayes (VB) is a popular estimation method for Bayesian inference. However, most existing VB algorithms are restricted to cases where the likelihood is tractable, which precludes their use in many important situations. Tran et…

The multinomial probit model is often used to analyze choice behaviour. However, estimation with existing Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods is computationally costly, which limits its applicability to large choice data sets. This…

Recent advances in stochastic gradient techniques have made it possible to estimate posterior distributions from large datasets via Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). However, when the target posterior is multimodal, mixing performance is…