Related papers: Easily Computed Marginal Likelihoods for Multivari…
We propose a new distribution, called the soft tMVN distribution, which provides a smooth approximation to the truncated multivariate normal (tMVN) distribution with linear constraints. An efficient blocked Gibbs sampler is developed to…
Finite mixture models are widely used in econometric analyses to capture unobserved heterogeneity. This paper shows that maximum likelihood estimation of finite mixtures of parametric densities can suffer from substantial finite-sample bias…
In this paper, we advance a recently-proposed uncertainty decoding scheme for DNN-HMM (deep neural network - hidden Markov model) hybrid systems. This numerical sampling concept averages DNN outputs produced by a finite set of feature…
We consider a semiparametric generalized linear model and study estimation of both marginal and quantile effects in this model. We propose an approximate maximum likelihood estimator, and rigorously establish the consistency, the asymptotic…
This paper considers a new approach to using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) in contexts where one may adopt multilevel (ML) Monte Carlo. The underlying problem is to approximate expectations w.r.t. an underlying probability measure that is…
In unsupervised classification, Hidden Markov Models (HMM) are used to account for a neighborhood structure between observations. The emission distributions are often supposed to belong to some parametric family. In this paper, a…
Driven by applications in telecommunication networks, we explore the simulation task of estimating rare event probabilities for tandem queues in their steady state. Existing literature has recognized that importance sampling methods can be…
We consider the problem of approximating the product of $n$ expectations with respect to a common probability distribution $\mu$. Such products routinely arise in statistics as values of the likelihood in latent variable models. Motivated…
Computing the marginal likelihood (also called the Bayesian model evidence) is an important task in Bayesian model selection, providing a principled quantitative way to compare models. The learned harmonic mean estimator solves the…
Fast robust methods for calculating likelihoods from CMB observations on small scales generally rely on approximations based on a set of power spectrum estimators and their covariances. We investigate the optimality of these approximation,…
Practitioners of Bayesian statistics have long depended on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) to obtain samples from intractable posterior distributions. Unfortunately, MCMC algorithms are typically serial, and do not scale to the large…
Consider the problem of estimating a multivariate normal mean with a known variance matrix, which is not necessarily proportional to the identity matrix. The coordinates are shrunk directly in proportion to their variances in Efron and…
We design and implement a novel algorithm for computing a multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) estimator of the cumulative distribution function of a quantity of interest in problems with random input parameters or initial conditions. Our approach…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) has emerged as a powerful Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method to sample from complex continuous distributions. However, a fundamental limitation of HMC is that it can not be applied to distributions with…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods provide consistent of integrals as the number of iterations goes to infinity. MCMC estimators are generally biased after any fixed number of iterations. We propose to remove this bias by using…
Stochastic approximation methods play a central role in maximum likelihood estimation problems involving intractable likelihood functions, such as marginal likelihoods arising in problems with missing or incomplete data, and in parametric…
When an unbiased estimator of the likelihood is used within a Metropolis--Hastings chain, it is necessary to trade off the number of Monte Carlo samples used to construct this estimator against the asymptotic variances of averages computed…
Interest is in evaluating, by Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation, the expected value of a function with respect to a, possibly unnormalized, probability distribution. A general purpose variance reduction technique for the MCMC…
Inference about dependencies in a multiway data array can be made using the array normal model, which corresponds to the class of multivariate normal distributions with separable covariance matrices. Maximum likelihood and Bayesian methods…
We investigate the complexity of covariance matrix estimation for Gibbs distributions based on dependent samples from a Markov chain. We show that when $\pi$ satisfies a Poincar\'e inequality and the chain possesses a spectral gap, we can…