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arXiv research

A locally-built, LLM-digested index of recent arXiv papers in quant finance, geometry/topology, and statistical ML — keyword search served straight from SQLite on this machine.

168,695 papers · 148 categories

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64127191254 · Jun 202019922001200920172026
48 results for MCMC inference

Statistical inference methods are fundamentally important in machine learning. Most state-of-the-art inference algorithms are variants of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) or variational inference (VI). However, both methods struggle with limitations in practice: MCMC methods can be computationally demanding; VI methods …

2018-05-25abs ↗pdf ↗

Proposes MIVI for efficient posterior estimation and design of MCMC transitions.

problem Efficiently estimating posterior distributions in constrained time.
method Combines variational inference and MCMC with a variational distribution and optimized Markov chain.
result Optimized Markov chain improves variational distribution and vice versa, leading to more accurate posteriors.

MetFlow combines MCMC and VI efficiently for better inference.

problem Combining MCMC and VI for efficient inference.
method Introduces MetFlow, a novel MCMC algorithm with Normalizing Flows, and a new method to combine it with VI.
result MetFlow produces expressive variational families with improved computational efficiency.

Normalized random measures (NRMs) provide a broad class of discrete random measures that are often used as priors for Bayesian nonparametric models. Dirichlet process is a well-known example of NRMs. Most of posterior inference methods for NRM mixture models rely on MCMC methods since they are easy to implement and the…

2015-11-18abs ↗pdf ↗

Bayesian neural networks tutorial via MCMC in Python.

problem Bayesian inference for parameter estimation and uncertainty quantification in deep learning models.
method MCMC sampling methods to implement Bayesian inference, including advanced proposal distributions.
result Challenges in sampling multi-modal posterior distributions for Bayesian neural networks.

We propose a novel approximate inference algorithm that approximates a target distribution by amortising the dynamics of a user-selected MCMC sampler. The idea is to initialise MCMC using samples from an approximation network, apply the MCMC operator to improve these samples, and finally use the samples to update the a…

2017-02-27abs ↗pdf ↗

Develops variational inference for Neyman-Scott processes for faster sampling.

problem Slow mixing time in MCMC for posterior sampling in Neyman-Scott processes.
method Variational inference algorithm for Neyman-Scott processes, minimizing KL divergence.
result Achieves better prediction performance than MCMC with limited computational time.

PriorCVAE uses deep generative models to infer hyperparameters in MCMC.

problem Losing hyperparameter information in GP prior inference.
method Conditioning VAE on hyperparameters to encode and estimate them during inference.
result PriorCVAE enables efficient and distinct inference of hyperparameters.

The hierarchical Dirichlet process (HDP) has become an important Bayesian nonparametric model for grouped data, such as document collections. The HDP is used to construct a flexible mixed-membership model where the number of components is determined by the data. As for most Bayesian nonparametric models, exact posterio…

2012-01-08abs ↗pdf ↗

This project compares MCMC and VI for Bayesian PMF on MovieLens.

problem Intractable posterior distribution in PMF.
method Employed MCMC and VI for Bayesian inference on MovieLens.
result VI converges faster, MCMC provides more accurate estimates.

We develop a method to combine Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and variational inference (VI), leveraging the advantages of both inference approaches. Specifically, we improve the variational distribution by running a few MCMC steps. To make inference tractable, we introduce the variational contrastive divergence (VCD)…

2019-05-10abs ↗pdf ↗

We introduce a novel approach for parallelizing MCMC inference in models with spatially determined conditional independence relationships, for which existing techniques exploiting graphical model structure are not applicable. Our approach is motivated by a model of seismic events and signals, where events detected in d…

2016-12-02abs ↗pdf ↗

New MCMC method estimates differential privacy from multiple MIAs without worst-case assumptions.

problem Bayesian estimation of differential privacy from membership inference attacks.
method Bayesian estimation via MCMC algorithm (MCMC-DP-Est).
result More cautious privacy analysis with joint estimation of MIA strengths and privacy parameter.

The paper develops methods for high-dimensional inference in Markov random fields.

problem Statistical inference for high-dimensional Markov random fields.
method Markov Chain Monte Carlo Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MCMC-MLE) with Elastic-net regularization.
result The proposed methods achieve 1\ell_{1}-consistency and false discovery rate control.

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are generally regarded as the gold standard technique for Bayesian inference. They are theoretically well-understood and conceptually simple to apply in practice. The drawback of MCMC is that in general performing exact inference requires all of the data to be processed at eac…

2019-07-16abs ↗pdf ↗

This work proposes new methods for variational inference using gradient flows on Gaussian measures.

problem Developing algorithmic guarantees for variational inference.
method Proposes principled methods for variational inference using gradient flows on the Bures--Wasserstein space of Gaussian measures.
result Strong theoretical guarantees for log-concave posteriors.

Eryn is a versatile MCMC package for Bayesian inference.

problem Bayesian inference for parameter estimation and model selection.
method Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm integrated into a user-friendly toolbox.
result Eryn can handle a wide range of Bayesian inference problems, from simple to complex.

We propose a stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (SG-MCMC) algorithm for scalable inference in mixed-membership stochastic blockmodels (MMSB). Our algorithm is based on the stochastic gradient Riemannian Langevin sampler and achieves both faster speed and higher accuracy at every iteration than the current sta…

2015-10-16abs ↗pdf ↗

Gradient-based MCMC for discrete spaces improves sampling performance.

problem Sampling in discrete spaces using traditional methods is challenging.
method Introduced new discrete Metropolis-Hastings samplers inspired by MALA, with a novel preconditioning technique.
result Demonstrated strong empirical performance across various challenging sampling problems.

The rapid development of computing power and efficient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation algorithms have revolutionized Bayesian statistics, making it a highly practical inference method in applied work. However, MCMC algorithms tend to be computationally demanding, and are particularly slow for large datasets…

2018-07-23abs ↗pdf ↗

Approximate inference algorithm is one of the fundamental research fields in machine learning. The two dominant theoretical inference frameworks in machine learning are variational inference (VI) and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). However, because of the fundamental limitation in the theory, it is very challenging to…

2018-11-17abs ↗pdf ↗

Develops a new MCMC-based Wishart prior for Gaussian Process covariance matrix.

problem Difficult inference for multivariate Gaussian Processes with multiple lengthscale parameters.
method Introduces a self-assembled Wishart prior and uses MCMC for Bayesian inference on kernel hyperparameters.
result Demonstrates the effectiveness of the new prior in GP-based learning with empirical results.

Stochastic gradient MCMC (SG-MCMC) algorithms have proven useful in scaling Bayesian inference to large datasets under an assumption of i.i.d data. We instead develop an SG-MCMC algorithm to learn the parameters of hidden Markov models (HMMs) for time-dependent data. There are two challenges to applying SG-MCMC in this…

2017-06-14abs ↗pdf ↗

Stein variational gradient descent improves inference in Gaussian process models.

problem Inference in Gaussian process models with non-Gaussian likelihoods and large data volumes is computationally intensive and inaccurate with traditional methods.
method Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) for non-parametric inference.
result SVGD monotonically decreases the Kullback-Leibler divergence from the sampling distribution to the true posterior.

Probabilistic models are conceptually powerful tools for finding structure in data, but their practical effectiveness is often limited by our ability to perform inference in them. Exact inference is frequently intractable, so approximate inference is often performed using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). To achieve the…

2012-10-28abs ↗pdf ↗

It is known that the Langevin dynamics used in MCMC is the gradient flow of the KL divergence on the Wasserstein space, which helps convergence analysis and inspires recent particle-based variational inference methods (ParVIs). But no more MCMC dynamics is understood in this way. In this work, by developing novel conce…

2019-02-01abs ↗pdf ↗

A fast MCMC sampler for sparse Bayesian inference.

problem Sparse Bayesian inference problems with high computational cost.
method Asynchronous Gibbs sampler extended with data sub-sampling.
result The Markov chain admits an invariant distribution that recovers the main signal with high probability.

A new variational method speeds up Bayesian phylogenetic inference.

problem Slow and inefficient MCMC methods in Bayesian phylogenetic inference.
method Combining subsplit Bayesian networks with variational inference for efficient tree topology and branch length estimation.
result Variational approach provides competitive performance with significantly fewer iterations.

Study improves Bayesian calibration of mechanical properties using active learning and MCMC.

problem Inference of spatially varying material parameters in computational mechanics.
method Comprehensive comparative study of surrogate models and MCMC algorithms.
result Active learning strategy outperforms a priori trained models in posterior estimation.

MCMC complexity matches optimization for large nn and dd.

problem Lack of theoretical understanding of MCMC complexity for large nn and dd.
method Comparison of MCMC, LA, and VI complexities for linear, logistic, and Poisson regression.
result MCMC complexity matches optimization complexity for ndn\gtrsim d.