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 …
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.
Trend · papers per month
Paper proposes first unlearning algorithm for MCMC models.
Adaptive workflow combines fast amortized inference with MCMC for many datasets.
Proposes MIVI for efficient posterior estimation and design of MCMC transitions.
Unified framework for MCMC and machine learning problems.
MetFlow combines MCMC and VI efficiently for better inference.
Two popular classes of methods for approximate inference are Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and variational inference. MCMC tends to be accurate if run for a long enough time, while variational inference tends to give better approximations at shorter time horizons. However, the amount of time needed for MCMC to exceed…
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…
New method reduces computational cost for Bayesian inference.
Bayesian neural networks tutorial via MCMC in Python.
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…
Develops variational inference for Neyman-Scott processes for faster sampling.
PriorCVAE uses deep generative models to infer hyperparameters in MCMC.
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…
Stochastic EM with biased MCMC improves inference stability.
This project compares MCMC and VI for Bayesian PMF on MovieLens.
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)…
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…
A new method combines variational inference and MCMC for efficient data subsampling.
New MCMC method estimates differential privacy from multiple MIAs without worst-case assumptions.
The paper develops methods for high-dimensional inference in Markov random fields.
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…
This work proposes new methods for variational inference using gradient flows on Gaussian measures.
EG-LF-MCMC infers posterior densities without likelihoods.
Eryn is a versatile MCMC package for Bayesian inference.
Unified framework for MCMC algorithms simplifies their design and application.
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…
This paper studies the fundamental problem of learning deep generative models that consist of multiple layers of latent variables organized in top-down architectures. Such models have high expressivity and allow for learning hierarchical representations. Learning such a generative model requires inferring the latent va…
Gradient-based MCMC for discrete spaces improves sampling performance.
New couplings improve understanding of molecular dynamics convergence.
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…
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…
Develops a new MCMC-based Wishart prior for Gaussian Process covariance matrix.
A new method combines MCMC results to avoid failures in parallel computing.
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…
Improved Bayesian inference for neuronal ensemble inference reduces computational cost.
Stein variational gradient descent improves inference in Gaussian process models.
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…
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…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is one of the main workhorses of probabilistic inference, but it is notoriously hard to measure the quality of approximate posterior samples. This challenge is particularly salient in black box inference methods, which can hide details and obscure inference failures. In this work, we ext…
A novel MCMC method clusters data faster and more accurately.
A fast MCMC sampler for sparse Bayesian inference.
KSD Thinning uses KSD to thin MCMC samples efficiently.
A new variational method speeds up Bayesian phylogenetic inference.
Study improves Bayesian calibration of mechanical properties using active learning and MCMC.
MCMC complexity matches optimization for large and .
New method for MCMC models without perfect or sequential samplers.
Kernel methods have revolutionized the fields of pattern recognition and machine learning. Their success, however, critically depends on the choice of kernel parameters. Using Gaussian process (GP) classification as a working example, this paper focuses on Bayesian inference of covariance (kernel) parameters using Mark…