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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.

168,694 papers · 148 categories

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142284425567 · Jun 202019922001200920172026
48 results for intractable distributions

A new method improves inference for complex Bayesian models.

problem Bayesian inference for doubly intractable distributions is computationally challenging.
method Monte Carlo Stein variational gradient descent (MC-SVGD) approach.
result The method achieves substantial computational gains over existing algorithms.

New MCMC methods use auxiliary variables to sample from intractable distributions.

problem Sampling from distributions with unknown normalizing constants.
method Unified Markov chain Monte Carlo framework with auxiliary variables.
result New algorithms outperform existing methods on synthetic and real datasets.

Bayesian inference for models that have an intractable partition function is known as a doubly intractable problem, where standard Monte Carlo methods are not applicable. The past decade has seen the development of auxiliary variable Monte Carlo techniques (Møller et al., 2006; Murray et al., 2006) for tackling this pr…

2017-10-12abs ↗pdf ↗

Generative Bayesian Filtering improves inference in complex models without explicit density evaluations.

problem Performing posterior inference in complex nonlinear and non-Gaussian state-space models.
method Generative Bayesian Filtering (GBF) extends GBC to dynamic settings using deep neural networks for recursive posterior inference. Generative-Gibbs sampler bypasses density evaluations for parameter learning.
result GBF significantly outperforms likelihood-free approaches in accuracy and robustness for intractable state-space models.

Semi-Implicit Variational Inference (SIVI) is improved with SIVI-SM using score matching.

problem Intractable densities in variational distributions hinder SIVI training.
method SIVI-SM uses score matching to handle intractable densities in a minimax formulation.
result SIVI-SM outperforms ELBO-based SIVI methods in Bayesian inference tasks.

A new method for sampling from posterior distributions in Bayesian inverse problems.

problem Sampling from posterior distributions in Bayesian inverse problems is challenging due to intractable terms.
method Proposes a novel approach that decomposes the transitions, allowing a trade-off between complexity of guidance term and prior transitions.
result Validated through experiments on various inverse problems, including challenging cases with latent diffusion models as priors.

Top-performing machine learning systems, such as deep neural networks, large ensembles and complex probabilistic graphical models, can be expensive to store, slow to evaluate and hard to integrate into larger systems. Ideally, we would like to replace such cumbersome models with simpler models that perform equally well…

2015-10-08abs ↗pdf ↗

How can we perform efficient inference and learning in directed probabilistic models, in the presence of continuous latent variables with intractable posterior distributions, and large datasets? We introduce a stochastic variational inference and learning algorithm that scales to large datasets and, under some mild dif…

2013-12-20abs ↗pdf ↗

Fitting probabilistic models to data is often difficult, due to the general intractability of the partition function and its derivatives. Here we propose a new parameter estimation technique that does not require computing an intractable normalization factor or sampling from the equilibrium distribution of the model. T…

2009-06-25abs ↗pdf ↗

New method uses neural exponential families for likelihood-free inference.

problem Bayesian Likelihood-Free Inference with intractable likelihood.
method Score Matching neural conditional exponential families for approximate likelihood.
result State-of-the-art performance in posterior sampling for intractable likelihood models.

Computing partition functions, the normalizing constants of probability distributions, is often hard. Variants of importance sampling give unbiased estimates of a normalizer Z, however, unbiased estimates of the reciprocal 1/Z are harder to obtain. Unbiased estimates of 1/Z allow Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling of "d…

2016-10-15abs ↗pdf ↗

Privacy preserving mechanisms such as differential privacy inject additional randomness in the form of noise in the data, beyond the sampling mechanism. Ignoring this additional noise can lead to inaccurate and invalid inferences. In this paper, we incorporate the privacy mechanism explicitly into the likelihood functi…

2015-11-24abs ↗pdf ↗

This paper solves robust utility maximization with unknown claim dependencies.

problem Investor optimizes utility in the presence of an intractable contingent claim.
method Quantile optimization approach, transforming dynamic problem into static concave optimization.
result Optimal payoffs depend on ambiguity attitude, market conditions, and claim characteristics.

A new gradient estimator for categorical distributions reduces bias and variance.

problem Intractability of gradients for categorical distributions in discrete latent variable models.
method CatLog-Derivative trick and IndeCateR gradient estimator.
result IndeCateR reduces bias and variance of gradients for categorical distributions.

ABI bypasses likelihood intractability with nonparametric distribution matching.

problem Approximate Bayesian computation's inefficiency in high-dimensional settings and under diffuse priors.
method Adaptive Bayesian Inference (ABI) compares posterior distributions directly using nonparametric distribution matching and MSW distance.
result ABI significantly outperforms other methods in high-dimensional or dependent observation regimes.

Optimizes experimental designs for intractable models using mutual information bounds.

problem Finding optimal experimental designs for models with intractable data-generating distributions.
method Maximizes mutual information lower bounds parametrized by neural networks, updating network parameters and designs simultaneously.
result Framework enables experimental design for various tasks including parameter estimation and model discrimination.

Many methods for machine learning rely on approximate inference from intractable probability distributions. Variational inference approximates such distributions by tractable models that can be subsequently used for approximate inference. Learning sufficiently accurate approximations requires a rich model family and ca…

2019-07-10abs ↗pdf ↗

Markov Chain Monte Carlo is repeatedly used to analyze the properties of intractable distributions in a convenient way. In this paper we derive conditions for geometric ergodicity of a general class of nonparametric stochastic volatility models with skewness driven by hidden Markov Chain with switching.

2012-09-07abs ↗pdf ↗

Likelihood-free methods such as approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) have extended the reach of statistical inference to problems with computationally intractable likelihoods. Such approaches perform well for small-to-moderate dimensional problems, but suffer a curse of dimensionality in the number of model parameter…

2019-06-11abs ↗pdf ↗

Paper develops a scalable distributed inference algorithm for sensor networks.

problem Efficient inference in intelligent sensor networks for location, tracking, and mapping.
method Distributed variational inference algorithm for continuous variables and large-scale data.
result Derives a separable lower bound for distributed variational inference with one-hop communication.

Variational Prediction simplifies Bayesian inference without test time costs.

problem Bayesian inference's computational costs and posterior predictive distribution marginalization.
method Variational Prediction learns a variational approximation to the posterior predictive distribution using a variational bound.
result Directly learns a variational approximation to the posterior predictive distribution without test time marginalization costs.

A new method improves Bayesian inference for multimodal posteriors.

problem Insensitivity to well-separated modes in multimodal posteriors.
method Weighted Kernel Stein Discrepancy method.
result Significantly improved mode sensitivity compared to standard KSD-Bayes.

We derive and approximate the conjugate prior of Dirichlet and beta distributions.

problem Intractability of conjugate prior for Dirichlet and beta distributions.
method Derive conjugate prior, define closed-form approximation, and provide algorithm.
result Closed-form approximation enables fully tractable Bayesian treatment.

ConDiSim uses diffusion models to approximate complex system posteriors efficiently.

problem Simulation-based inference of systems with intractable likelihoods.
method Conditional diffusion model with forward and reverse processes.
result Effective posterior approximation across various benchmark and real-world problems.

New method for density estimation without approximating posterior distributions.

problem Challenges in non-smooth data distributions for Bayesian density estimation.
method Autoregressive likelihood decomposition and Gaussian process prior in a quasi-Bayesian framework.
result Achieves state-of-the-art results in small-data regimes.

A new method uses mixture approximations to improve diffusion models for Bayesian inverse problems.

problem Approximating posterior distributions in Bayesian inverse problems with intractable likelihoods.
method Proposes a mixture-based approximation of intermediate posterior distributions and uses Gibbs sampling for practical sampling.
result Validated the approach on image inverse problems and audio source separation, demonstrating improved performance.

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are a powerful approach to unsupervised learning. They have achieved state-of-the-art performance in the image domain. However, GANs are limited in two ways. They often learn distributions with low support---a phenomenon known as mode collapse---and they do not guarantee the exist…

2019-10-09abs ↗pdf ↗

Thompson sampling (TS) is a class of algorithms for sequential decision-making, which requires maintaining a posterior distribution over a model. However, calculating exact posterior distributions is intractable for all but the simplest models. Consequently, efficient computation of an approximate posterior distributio…

2019-02-19abs ↗pdf ↗

The exchange algorithm is studied for its convergence and asymptotic variance.

problem Theoretical limitations of the exchange algorithm in sampling from doubly-intractable distributions.
method Theoretical analysis of the exchange algorithm's convergence speed and asymptotic variance.
result The exchange algorithm converges at a geometric rate and satisfies a Central Limit Theorem.

We consider the problem of computing first-passage time distributions for reaction processes modelled by master equations. We show that this generally intractable class of problems is equivalent to a sequential Bayesian inference problem for an auxiliary observation process. The solution can be approximated efficiently…

2017-06-01abs ↗pdf ↗