Related papers: Exact and Approximate MCMC for Doubly-intractable …
Sampling from the full posterior distribution of high-dimensional non-linear, non-Gaussian latent dynamical models presents significant computational challenges. While Particle Gibbs (also known as conditional sequential Monte Carlo) is…
Many applications in the field of statistics require Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. Determining appropriate starting values and run lengths can be both analytically and empirically challenging. A desire to overcome these problems has led…
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)…
Standard MCMC methods can scale poorly to big data settings due to the need to evaluate the likelihood at each iteration. There have been a number of approximate MCMC algorithms that use sub-sampling ideas to reduce this computational…
We propose an adaptive importance sampling scheme for Gaussian approximations of intractable posteriors. Optimization-based approximations like variational inference can be too inaccurate while existing Monte Carlo methods can be too slow.…
We develop an algorithm for automatic differentiation of Metropolis-Hastings samplers, allowing us to differentiate through probabilistic inference, even if the model has discrete components within it. Our approach fuses recent advances in…
Bayesian inference with Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is challenging when the likelihood function is irregular and expensive to compute. We explore several sampling algorithms that make use of subset evaluations to reduce computational…
We show that for any multiple-try Metropolis algorithm, one can always accept the proposal and evaluate the importance weight that is needed to correct for the bias without extra computational cost. This results in a general, convenient,…
Using Markov chain Monte Carlo to sample from posterior distributions was the key innovation which made Bayesian data analysis practical. Notoriously, however, MCMC is hard to tune, hard to diagnose, and hard to parallelize. This…
In this work, we present, analyze, and implement a class of Multi-Level Markov chain Monte Carlo (ML-MCMC) algorithms based on independent Metropolis-Hastings proposals for Bayesian inverse problems. In this context, the likelihood function…
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…
Recent developments in big data and analytics research have produced an abundance of large data sets that are too big to be analyzed in their entirety, due to limits on computer memory or storage capacity. To address these issues,…
Uncertainty estimation in deep models is essential in many real-world applications and has benefited from developments over the last several years. Recent evidence suggests that existing solutions dependent on simple Gaussian formulations…
We consider posterior sampling in the very common Bayesian hierarchical model in which observed data depends on high-dimensional latent variables that, in turn, depend on relatively few hyperparameters. When the full conditional over the…
Constructing unbiased estimators from Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) outputs is a difficult problem that has recently received a lot of attention in the statistics and machine learning communities. However, the current unbiased MCMC…
To sample from a given target distribution, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling relies on constructing an ergodic Markov chain with the target distribution as its invariant measure. For any MCMC method, an important question is how to…
We propose a novel sampling framework for inference in probabilistic models: an active learning approach that converges more quickly (in wall-clock time) than Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) benchmarks. The central challenge in…
Bayesian inference for models with intractable likelihoods, such as Markov random fields, poses a fundamental computational challenge due to the tradeoff between inferential accuracy and computational cost. Various MCMC methods have been…
Bayesian hierarchical modeling is a popular approach to capturing unobserved heterogeneity across individual units. However, standard estimation methods such as Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) can be impracticable for modeling outcomes from…
The independence sampler is one of the most commonly used MCMC algorithms usually as a component of a Metropolis-within-Gibbs algorithm. The common focus for the independence sampler is on the choice of proposal distribution to obtain an as…