Related papers: An Auto-validating Rejection Sampler
High-dimensional count data poses significant challenges for statistical analysis, necessitating effective methods that also preserve explainability. We focus on a low rank constrained variant of the Poisson log-normal model, which relates…
One of the most demanding calculations is to generate random samples from a specified probability distribution (usually with an unknown normalizing prefactor) in a high-dimensional configuration space. One often has to resort to using a…
Monte Carlo methods are used to approximate the means, $\mu$, of random variables $Y$, whose distributions are not known explicitly. The key idea is that the average of a random sample, $Y_1, ..., Y_n$, tends to $\mu$ as $n$ tends to…
We introduce YOASOVI, an algorithm for performing fast, self-correcting stochastic optimization for Variational Inference (VI) on large Bayesian heirarchical models. To accomplish this, we take advantage of available information on the…
Extant "fast" algorithms for Monte Carlo confidence sets are limited to univariate shift parameters for the one-sample and two-sample problems using the sample mean as the test statistic; moreover, some do not converge reliably and most do…
Importance sampling (IS) is commonly used for cross validation (CV) in Bayesian models, because it only involves reweighting existing posterior draws without needing to re-estimate the model by re-running Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC).…
A plethora of problems in AI, engineering and the sciences are naturally formalized as inference in discrete probabilistic models. Exact inference is often prohibitively expensive, as it may require evaluating the (unnormalized) target…
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…
We propose nested sequential Monte Carlo (NSMC), a methodology to sample from sequences of probability distributions, even where the random variables are high-dimensional. NSMC generalises the SMC framework by requiring only approximate,…
Performing exact inference on Bayesian networks is known to be #P-hard. Typically approximate inference techniques are used instead to sample from the distribution on query variables given the values $e$ of evidence variables. Classically,…
We present a novel technique for learning the mass matrices in samplers obtained from discretized dynamics that preserve some energy function. Existing adaptive samplers use Riemannian preconditioning techniques, where the mass matrices are…
The inferential model (IM) framework offers alternatives to the familiar probabilistic (e.g., Bayesian and fiducial) uncertainty quantification in statistical inference. Allowing this uncertainty quantification to be imprecise makes it…
The bootstrap, based on resampling, has, for several decades, been a widely used method for computing confidence intervals for applications where no exact method is available and when sample sizes are not large enough to be able to rely on…
A number of problems in a variety of fields are characterised by target distributions with a multimodal structure in which the presence of several isolated local maxima dramatically reduces the efficiency of Markov Chain Monte Carlo…
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.…
Riemann manifold Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (RMHMC) has the potential to produce high-quality Markov chain Monte Carlo-output even for very challenging target distributions. To this end, a symmetric positive definite scaling matrix for RMHMC,…
Generative diffusion models have recently emerged as a powerful strategy to perform stochastic sampling in Bayesian inverse problems, delivering remarkably accurate solutions for a wide range of challenging applications. However, diffusion…
We present a rejection method based on recursive covering of the probability density function with equal tiles. The concept works for any probability density function that is pointwise computable or representable by tabular data. By the…
Our method proposes the efficient generation of samples from an unnormalized Boltzmann density by solving the underlying continuity equation in the low-rank tensor train (TT) format. It is based on the annealing path commonly used in MCMC…
We consider the problem of multivariate density deconvolution where the distribution of a random vector needs to be estimated from replicates contaminated with conditionally heteroscedastic measurement errors. We propose a conceptually…