Related papers: An Auto-validating Rejection Sampler
Approximate Bayesian computation is an established and popular method for likelihood-free inference with applications in many disciplines. The effectiveness of the method depends critically on the availability of well performing summary…
The machine learning random Fourier feature method for data in high dimension is computationally and theoretically attractive since the optimization is based on a convex standard least squares problem and independent sampling of Fourier…
Markov chain Monte Carlo methods have become standard tools in statistics to sample from complex probability measures. Many available techniques rely on discrete-time reversible Markov chains whose transition kernels build up over the…
In conducting non-linear dimensionality reduction and feature learning, it is common to suppose that the data lie near a lower-dimensional manifold. A class of model-based approaches for such problems includes latent variables in an unknown…
We consider the task of generating exact samples from a target distribution, known up to normalization, over a finite alphabet. The classical algorithm for this task is rejection sampling, and although it has been used in practice for…
This paper addresses the challenging computational problem of estimating intractable expectations over discrete domains. Existing approaches, including Monte Carlo and Russian Roulette estimators, are consistent but often require a large…
Many inference problems involve inferring the number $N$ of components in some region, along with their properties $\{\mathbf{x}_i\}_{i=1}^N$, from a dataset $\mathcal{D}$. A common statistical example is finite mixture modelling. In the…
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…
This paper proposes a novel Bayesian framework for solving Poisson inverse problems by devising a Monte Carlo sampling algorithm which accounts for the underlying non-Euclidean geometry. To address the challenges posed by the Poisson…
Assessing whether a sample survey credibly represents the population is a critical question for ensuring the validity of downstream research. Generally, this problem reduces to estimating the distance between two high-dimensional…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is the mainstay of applied Bayesian inference for differentiable models. However, HMC still struggles to sample from hierarchical models that induce densities with multiscale geometry: a large step size is…
Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) is computationally intensive for complex model simulators. To exploit expensive simulations, data-resampling via bootstrapping can be employed to obtain many artificial datasets at little cost.…
Adaptive importance sampling is a class of techniques for finding good proposal distributions for importance sampling. Often the proposal distributions are standard probability distributions whose parameters are adapted based on the…
We develop a novel Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method that exploits a hierarchy of models of increasing complexity to efficiently generate samples from an unnormalized target distribution. Broadly, the method rewrites the Multilevel…
Bayesian methods and their implementations by means of sophisticated Monte Carlo techniques, such as Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and particle filters, have become very popular in signal processing over the last years. However, in many…
Frequentist and likelihood methods of inference based on the multivariate skew-normal model encounter several technical difficulties with this model. In spite of the popularity of this class of densities, there are no broadly satisfactory…
We propose a variant of Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC), called the Repelling-Attracting Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (RAHMC), for sampling from multimodal distributions. The key idea that underpins RAHMC is a departure from the conservative…
In this work we present a non-reversible, tuning- and rejection-free Markov chain Monte Carlo which naturally fits in the framework of hit-and-run. The sampler only requires access to the gradient of the log-density function, hence the…
Bayesian inference for models with intractable likelihood functions represents a challenging suite of problems in modern statistics. In this work we analyse the Conway-Maxwell-Poisson (COM-Poisson) distribution, a two parameter…
Increasingly complex applications involve large datasets in combination with non-linear and high dimensional mathematical models. In this context, statistical inference is a challenging issue that calls for pragmatic approaches that take…