Related papers: Auto-validating von Neumann Rejection Sampling fro…
In Bayesian statistical inference and computationally intensive frequentist inference, one is interested in obtaining samples from a high dimensional, and possibly multi-modal target density. The challenge is to obtain samples from this…
Rejection sampling is a well-known method to sample from a target distribution, given the ability to sample from a given distribution. The method has been first formalized by von Neumann (1951) and has many applications in classical…
Rejection sampling is a common tool for low dimensional problems ($d \leq 2$), often touted as an "easy" way to obtain valid samples from a distribution $f(\cdot)$ of interest. In practice it is non-trivial to apply, often requiring…
Boltzmann samplers, introduced by Duchon et al. in 2001, make it possible to uniformly draw approximate size objects from any class which can be specified through the symbolic method. This, through by evaluating the associated generating…
Learning latent variable models with stochastic variational inference is challenging when the approximate posterior is far from the true posterior, due to high variance in the gradient estimates. We propose a novel rejection sampling step…
Rejection Sampling is a fundamental Monte-Carlo method. It is used to sample from distributions admitting a probability density function which can be evaluated exactly at any given point, albeit at a high computational cost. However,…
In the note we consider an iterative generalisation of the rejection sampling method. In high energy physics, this sampling is frequently used for event generation, i.e. preparation of phase space points distributed according to a matrix…
A number of distributions that arise in statistical applications can be expressed in the form of a weighted density: the product of a base density and a nonnegative weight function. Generating variates from such a distribution may be…
Respondent-Driven Sampling is a popular technique for sampling hidden populations. This paper models Respondent-Driven Sampling as a Markov process indexed by a tree. Our main results show that the Volz-Heckathorn estimator is…
In generative models with obscured likelihood, Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) is often the tool of last resort for inference. However, ABC demands many prior parameter trials to keep only a small fraction that passes an acceptance…
This paper considers properties of an optimization based sampler for targeting the posterior distribution when the likelihood is intractable and auxiliary statistics are used to summarize information in the data. Our reverse sampler…
In this paper, we consider several efficient data structures for the problem of sampling from a dynamically changing discrete probability distribution, where some prior information is known on the distribution of the rates, in particular…
Phylogenomics, even more so than traditional phylogenetics, needs to represent the uncertainty in evolutionary trees due to systematic error. Here we illustrate the analysis of genome-scale alignments of yeast, using robust measures of the…
Phylogenetics is now fundamental in life sciences, providing insights into the earliest branches of life and the origins and spread of epidemics. However, finding suitable phylogenies from the vast space of possible trees remains…
We consider inference about the history of a sample of DNA sequences, conditional upon the haplotype counts and the number of segregating sites observed at the present time. After deriving some theoretical results in the coalescent setting,…
Phylogenetic tree inference using deep DNA sequencing is reshaping our understanding of rapidly evolving systems, such as the within-host battle between viruses and the immune system. Densely sampled phylogenetic trees can contain special…
Traditional approaches to variational inference rely on parametric families of variational distributions, with the choice of family playing a critical role in determining the accuracy of the resulting posterior approximation. Simple…
Rejection sampling is a technique for sampling from difficult distributions. However, its use is limited due to a high rejection rate. Common adaptive rejection sampling methods either work only for very specific distributions or without…
The assumption that training and testing samples are generated from the same distribution does not always hold for real-world machine-learning applications. The procedure of tackling this discrepancy between the training (source) and…
In the small phylogeny problem we, are given a phylogenetic tree and gene orders of the extant species and our goal is to reconstruct all of the ancestral genomes so that the number of evolutionary operations is minimized. Algorithms for…