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Multi-messenger observations of binary neutron star mergers offer a promising path towards resolution of the Hubble constant ($H_0$) tension, provided their constraints are shown to be free from systematics such as the Malmquist bias. In…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2021-11-03 Francesca Gerardi , Stephen M. Feeney , Justin Alsing

We revisit empirical Bayes in the absence of a tractable likelihood function, as is typical in scientific domains relying on computer simulations. We investigate how the empirical Bayesian can make use of neural density estimators first to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-03-02 Maxime Vandegar , Michael Kagan , Antoine Wehenkel , Gilles Louppe

Marginal likelihood, also known as model evidence, is a fundamental quantity in Bayesian statistics. It is used for model selection using Bayes factors or for empirical Bayes tuning of prior hyper-parameters. Yet, the calculation of…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-09-04 Anindya Bhadra , Ksheera Sagar , David Rowe , Sayantan Banerjee , Jyotishka Datta

In this paper, we present a method for computing the marginal likelihood, also known as the model likelihood or Bayesian evidence, from Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), or other sampled posterior distributions. In order to do this, one…

Estimation of finite mixture models when the mixing distribution support is unknown is an important problem. This paper gives a new approach based on a marginal likelihood for the unknown support. Motivated by a Bayesian Dirichlet prior…

Methodology · Statistics 2013-02-11 Ryan Martin

Simulation-based inference (SBI) methods such as approximate Bayesian computation (ABC), synthetic likelihood, and neural posterior estimation (NPE) rely on simulating statistics to infer parameters of intractable likelihood models.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-06 Daolang Huang , Ayush Bharti , Amauri Souza , Luigi Acerbi , Samuel Kaski

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.…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-07-18 Zihan Liao , Binbin Li , Hua-Ping Wan

Bayesian inference methods such as Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) typically require repeated computations of the likelihood function, but in some scenarios this is infeasible and alternative methods are needed. Simulation-based inference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-10 Linnea M Wolniewicz , Peter Sadowski , Claudio Corti

Bayesian simulation-based inference (SBI) methods are used in statistical models where simulation is feasible but the likelihood is intractable. Standard SBI methods can perform poorly in cases of model misspecification, and there has been…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-04-15 Wang Yuyan , Michael Evans , David J. Nott

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…

Computation · Statistics 2025-04-14 Subhayan De , Reza Farzad , Patrick T. Brewick , Erik A. Johnson , Steven F. Wojtkiewicz

The challenges posed by complex stochastic models used in computational ecology, biology and genetics have stimulated the development of approximate approaches to statistical inference. Here we focus on Synthetic Likelihood (SL), a…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-06-09 Matteo Fasiolo , Simon N. Wood , Florian Hartig , Mark V. Bravington

Likelihood-free approaches are appealing for performing inference on complex dependence models, either because it is not possible to formulate a likelihood function, or its evaluation is very computationally costly. This is the case for…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-08 Lídia M. André , Jennifer L. Wadsworth , Raphaël Huser

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…

Computation · Statistics 2014-11-14 Jeong Eun Lee , Christian P. Robert

Our paper deals with inferring simulator-based statistical models given some observed data. A simulator-based model is a parametrized mechanism which specifies how data are generated. It is thus also referred to as generative model. We…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-01-01 Michael U. Gutmann , Jukka Corander

The marginal likelihood of a model is a key quantity for assessing the evidence provided by the data in support of a model. The marginal likelihood is the normalizing constant for the posterior density, obtained by integrating the product…

Populations and Evolution · Quantitative Biology 2018-11-30 Mathieu Fourment , Andrew F. Magee , Chris Whidden , Arman Bilge , Frederick A. Matsen , Vladimir N. Minin

State-of-the-art neural network-based methods for learning summary statistics have delivered promising results for simulation-based likelihood-free parameter inference. Existing approaches require density estimation as a post-processing…

We introduce a new amortized likelihood ratio estimator for likelihood-free simulation-based inference (SBI). Our estimator is simple to train and estimates the likelihood ratio using a single forward pass of the neural estimator. Our…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-11-20 Adam D. Cobb , Brian Matejek , Daniel Elenius , Anirban Roy , Susmit Jha

Nonprobability (convenience) samples are increasingly sought to reduce the estimation variance for one or more population variables of interest that are estimated using a randomized survey (reference) sample by increasing the effective…

Synthetic likelihood is an attractive approach to likelihood-free inference when an approximately Gaussian summary statistic for the data, informative for inference about the parameters, is available. The synthetic likelihood method derives…

Simulation-based inference (SBI) enables amortized Bayesian inference by first training a neural posterior estimator (NPE) on prior-simulator pairs, typically through low-dimensional summary statistics, which can then be cheaply reused for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-11 Sherman Khoo , Dennis Prangle , Song Liu , Mark Beaumont