Related papers: Nested importance sampling for Bayesian inference:…
Importance sampling (IS) is an important technique to reduce the estimation variance in Monte Carlo simulations. In many practical problems, however, the use of IS method may result in unbounded variance, and thus fail to provide reliable…
Many statistical applications involve models for which it is difficult to evaluate the likelihood, but from which it is relatively easy to sample. Approximate Bayesian computation is a likelihood-free method for implementing Bayesian…
Recent advances in Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) extend the scope of Bayesian inference to models for which the likelihood function is intractable. Although these developments allow us to estimate model parameters, other basic problems…
This paper surveys some well-established approaches on the approximation of Bayes factors used in Bayesian model choice, mostly as covered in Chen et al. (2000). Our focus here is on methods that are based on importance sampling strategies…
Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) provide a formalism to quantify and calibrate uncertainty in deep learning. Current inference approaches for BNNs often resort to few-sample estimation for scalability, which can harm predictive performance,…
Approximating integrals is a fundamental task in probability theory and statistical inference, and their applied fields of signal processing, and Bayesian learning, as soon as expectations over probability distributions must be computed…
An essential problem in statistics and machine learning is the estimation of expectations involving PDFs with intractable normalizing constants. The self-normalized importance sampling (SNIS) estimator, which normalizes the IS weights, has…
Importance Sampling (IS), an effective variance reduction strategy in Monte Carlo (MC) simulation, is frequently utilized for Bayesian inference and other statistical challenges. Quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) replaces the random samples in MC…
Design of experiments has traditionally relied on the frequentist hypothesis testing framework where the optimal size of the experiment is specified as the minimum sample size that guarantees a required level of power. Sample size…
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…
We consider importance sampling (IS) type weighted estimators based on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) targeting an approximate marginal of the target distribution. In the context of Bayesian latent variable models, the MCMC typically…
Importance sampling (IS) is valuable in reducing the variance of Monte Carlo sampling for many areas, including finance, rare event simulation, and Bayesian inference. It is natural and obvious to combine quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) methods…
Importance sampling (IS) is an efficient stand-in for model refitting in performing (LOO) cross-validation (CV) on a Bayesian model. IS inverts the Bayesian update for a single observation by reweighting posterior samples. The so-called…
Importance sampling is a popular technique in Bayesian inference: by reweighting samples drawn from a proposal distribution we are able to obtain samples and moment estimates from a Bayesian posterior over latent variables. Recent work,…
In all areas of human knowledge, datasets are increasing in both size and complexity, creating the need for richer statistical models. This trend is also true for economic data, where high-dimensional and nonlinear/nonparametric inference…
Approximate Bayesian inference on the basis of summary statistics is well-suited to complex problems for which the likelihood is either mathematically or computationally intractable. However the methods that use rejection suffer from the…
Bayesian analysis plays a crucial role in estimating distribution of unknown parameters for given data and model. Due to the curse of dimensionality, it becomes difficult for high-dimensional problems, especially when multiple modes exist.…
In this paper we address the problem of performing Bayesian inference for the parameters of a nonlinear multi-output model and the covariance matrix of the different output signals. We propose an adaptive importance sampling (AIS) scheme…
Variational inference approximates the posterior distribution of a probabilistic model with a parameterized density by maximizing a lower bound for the model evidence. Modern solutions fit a flexible approximation with stochastic gradient…
In the following article we provide an exposition of exact computational methods to perform parameter inference from partially observed network models. In particular, we consider the duplication attachment (DA) model which has a likelihood…