423 research outputs found
Unbiased and Consistent Nested Sampling via Sequential Monte Carlo
We introduce a new class of sequential Monte Carlo methods called Nested
Sampling via Sequential Monte Carlo (NS-SMC), which reframes the Nested
Sampling method of Skilling (2006) in terms of sequential Monte Carlo
techniques. This new framework allows convergence results to be obtained in the
setting when Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is used to produce new samples. An
additional benefit is that marginal likelihood estimates are unbiased. In
contrast to NS, the analysis of NS-SMC does not require the (unrealistic)
assumption that the simulated samples be independent. As the original NS
algorithm is a special case of NS-SMC, this provides insights as to why NS
seems to produce accurate estimates despite a typical violation of its
assumptions. For applications of NS-SMC, we give advice on tuning MCMC kernels
in an automated manner via a preliminary pilot run, and present a new method
for appropriately choosing the number of MCMC repeats at each iteration.
Finally, a numerical study is conducted where the performance of NS-SMC and
temperature-annealed SMC is compared on several challenging and realistic
problems. MATLAB code for our experiments is made available at
https://github.com/LeahPrice/SMC-NS .Comment: 45 pages, some minor typographical errors fixed since last versio
Efficient Sequential Monte-Carlo Samplers for Bayesian Inference
In many problems, complex non-Gaussian and/or nonlinear models are required
to accurately describe a physical system of interest. In such cases, Monte
Carlo algorithms are remarkably flexible and extremely powerful approaches to
solve such inference problems. However, in the presence of a high-dimensional
and/or multimodal posterior distribution, it is widely documented that standard
Monte-Carlo techniques could lead to poor performance. In this paper, the study
is focused on a Sequential Monte-Carlo (SMC) sampler framework, a more robust
and efficient Monte Carlo algorithm. Although this approach presents many
advantages over traditional Monte-Carlo methods, the potential of this emergent
technique is however largely underexploited in signal processing. In this work,
we aim at proposing some novel strategies that will improve the efficiency and
facilitate practical implementation of the SMC sampler specifically for signal
processing applications. Firstly, we propose an automatic and adaptive strategy
that selects the sequence of distributions within the SMC sampler that
minimizes the asymptotic variance of the estimator of the posterior
normalization constant. This is critical for performing model selection in
modelling applications in Bayesian signal processing. The second original
contribution we present improves the global efficiency of the SMC sampler by
introducing a novel correction mechanism that allows the use of the particles
generated through all the iterations of the algorithm (instead of only
particles from the last iteration). This is a significant contribution as it
removes the need to discard a large portion of the samples obtained, as is
standard in standard SMC methods. This will improve estimation performance in
practical settings where computational budget is important to consider.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1303.3123 by other author
Bayesian Parameter Estimation for Latent Markov Random Fields and Social Networks
Undirected graphical models are widely used in statistics, physics and
machine vision. However Bayesian parameter estimation for undirected models is
extremely challenging, since evaluation of the posterior typically involves the
calculation of an intractable normalising constant. This problem has received
much attention, but very little of this has focussed on the important practical
case where the data consists of noisy or incomplete observations of the
underlying hidden structure. This paper specifically addresses this problem,
comparing two alternative methodologies. In the first of these approaches
particle Markov chain Monte Carlo (Andrieu et al., 2010) is used to efficiently
explore the parameter space, combined with the exchange algorithm (Murray et
al., 2006) for avoiding the calculation of the intractable normalising constant
(a proof showing that this combination targets the correct distribution in
found in a supplementary appendix online). This approach is compared with
approximate Bayesian computation (Pritchard et al., 1999). Applications to
estimating the parameters of Ising models and exponential random graphs from
noisy data are presented. Each algorithm used in the paper targets an
approximation to the true posterior due to the use of MCMC to simulate from the
latent graphical model, in lieu of being able to do this exactly in general.
The supplementary appendix also describes the nature of the resulting
approximation.Comment: 26 pages, 2 figures, accepted in Journal of Computational and
Graphical Statistics (http://www.amstat.org/publications/jcgs.cfm
- …