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Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms have become powerful tools for Bayesian inference. However, they do not scale well to large-data problems. Divide-and-conquer strategies, which split the data into batches and, for each batch, run…
Non-differentiable priors are standard in modern parsimonious Bayesian models. Lack of differentiability, however, precludes gradient-based Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) for posterior sampling. Recently proposed proximal MCMC approaches…
Estimating the predictive uncertainty of a Bayesian learning model is critical in various decision-making problems, e.g., reinforcement learning, detecting adversarial attack, self-driving car. As the model posterior is almost always…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are routinely used to draw samples from distributions with intractable normalization constants. However, standard MCMC algorithms do not apply to doubly-intractable distributions in which there are…
The Bayesian elastic net regression model is characterized by the regression coefficient prior distribution, the negative log density of which corresponds to the elastic net penalty function. While Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods…
The Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm is a widely recognised as an efficient method for sampling a specified posterior distribution. However, when the posterior is multi-modal, conventional MCMC algorithms either tend to become…
Many contemporary machine learning models require extensive tuning of hyperparameters to perform well. A variety of methods, such as Bayesian optimization, have been developed to automate and expedite this process. However, tuning remains…
Stein importance sampling is a widely applicable technique based on kernelized Stein discrepancy, which corrects the output of approximate sampling algorithms by reweighting the empirical distribution of the samples. A general analysis of…
Bayesian nonparametric methods are a popular choice for analysing survival data due to their ability to flexibly model the distribution of survival times. These methods typically employ a nonparametric prior on the survival function that is…
Investigating critical phenomena or phase transitions is of high interest in physics and chemistry, for which Monte Carlo (MC) simulations, a crucial tool for numerically analyzing macroscopic properties of given systems, are often hindered…
Motivated by molecular biology, there has been an upsurge of research activities in directional statistics in general and its Bayesian aspect in particular. The central distribution for the circular case is von Mises distribution which has…
We consider Bayesian inference by importance sampling when the likelihood is analytically intractable but can be unbiasedly estimated. We refer to this procedure as importance sampling squared (IS2), as we can often estimate the likelihood…
Slice sampling is a well-established Markov chain Monte Carlo method for (approximate) sampling of target distributions which are only known up to a normalizing constant. The method is based on choosing a new state on a slice, i.e., a…
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…
This paper studies the problem of detecting the information source in a network in which the spread of information follows the popular Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model. We assume all nodes in the network are in the susceptible…
Markov-chain Monte Carlo sampling has become a standard technique for exploring the posterior distribution of cosmological parameters constrained by observations of CMB anisotropies. Given an infinite amount of time, any MCMC sampler will…
We propose a modification of the improved cross entropy (iCE) method to enhance its performance for network reliability assessment. The iCE method performs a transition from the nominal density to the optimal importance sampling (IS)…
We introduce a framework that enables efficient sampling from learned probability distributions for MRI reconstruction. Different from conventional deep learning-based MRI reconstruction techniques, samples are drawn from the posterior…
Posterior sampling allows exploitation of prior knowledge on the environment's transition dynamics to improve the sample efficiency of reinforcement learning. The prior is typically specified as a class of parametric distributions, the…
Monte Carlo methods represent the "de facto" standard for approximating complicated integrals involving multidimensional target distributions. In order to generate random realizations from the target distribution, Monte Carlo techniques use…