Related papers: Easily Computed Marginal Likelihoods for Multivari…

A class of random hazard rates, which is defined as a mixture of an indicator kernel convolved with a completely random measure, is of interest. We provide an explicit characterization of the posterior distribution of this mixture hazard…

Computing partition functions, the normalizing constants of probability distributions, is often hard. Variants of importance sampling give unbiased estimates of a normalizer Z, however, unbiased estimates of the reciprocal 1/Z are harder to…

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a powerful Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method for performing approximate inference in complex probabilistic models of continuous variables. In common with many MCMC methods, however, the standard HMC…

Statistical inference methods are fundamentally important in machine learning. Most state-of-the-art inference algorithms are variants of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) or variational inference (VI). However, both methods struggle with…

Posterior distributions often feature intractable normalizing constants, called marginal likelihoods or evidence, that are useful for model comparison via Bayes factors. This has motivated a number of methods for estimating ratios of…

The ability to generate samples of the random effects from their conditional distributions is fundamental for inference in mixed effects models. Random walk Metropolis is widely used to perform such sampling, but this method is known to…

The objective of this article is to study the asymptotic behavior of a new particle filtering approach in the context of hidden Markov models (HMMs). In particular, we develop an algorithm where the latent-state sequence is segmented into…

The marginal likelihood is a central tool for drawing Bayesian inference about the number of components in mixture models. It is often approximated since the exact form is unavailable. A bias in the approximation may be due to an incomplete…

The Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is a widely used method for maximum likelihood estimation in models with latent variables. For estimating mixtures of Gaussians, its iteration can be viewed as a soft version of the k-means…

To backpropagate the gradients through stochastic binary layers, we propose the augment-REINFORCE-merge (ARM) estimator that is unbiased, exhibits low variance, and has low computational complexity. Exploiting variable augmentation,…

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)…

Sampling from high dimensional distributions is a computational bottleneck in many scientific applications. Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC), and in particular the No-U-Turn Sampler (NUTS), are widely used, yet they struggle on problems with a…

We develop a modular approach to Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling for unnormalized target densities. In this approach, Markov chains are constructed in parallel, each constrained to a subset of the target space. The Monte Carlo…

This paper addresses the key challenge of estimating the asymptotic covariance associated with the Markov chain central limit theorem, which is essential for visualizing and terminating Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulations. We focus…

To take sample biases and skewness in the observations into account, practitioners frequently weight their observations according to some marginal distribution. The present paper demonstrates that such weighting can indeed improve the…

The generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) is widely used for analyzing correlated data, particularly in large-scale biomedical and social science applications. Scalable Bayesian inference for GLMMs is challenging because the marginal…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods to sample from a probability distribution $\pi$ defined on a space $(\Theta,\mathcal{T})$ consist of the simulation of realisations of Markov chains $\{\theta_{n},n\geq1\}$ of invariant distribution…

We provide an efficient algorithm for the classical problem, going back to Galton, Pearson, and Fisher, of estimating, with arbitrary accuracy the parameters of a multivariate normal distribution from truncated samples. Truncated samples…

Mixtures of truncated exponentials (MTE) potentials are an alternative to discretization for representing continuous chance variables in influence diagrams. Also, MTE potentials can be used to approximate utility functions. This paper…

In computational mechanics, multiple models are often present to describe a physical system. While Bayesian model selection is a helpful tool to compare these models using measurement data, it requires the computationally expensive…