Introduction Many modern algorithms in computational Bayesian statistics have at their heart a particle filter or some other sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) procedure. In this blog I’ve discussed particle MCMC algorithms which use a particle filter in the inner-loop in order to compute a (noisy, unbiased) estimate of the marginal likelihood of the data. These … Continue reading A scalable particle filter in Scala
On Friday the Royal Statistical Society hosted a meeting on Statistical computing languages, organised by my colleague Colin Gillespie. Four languages were presented at the meeting: Python, Scala, Matlab and Julia. I presented the talk on Scala. The slides I presented are available, in addition to the code examples and instructions on how to run … Continue reading Statistical computing languages at the RSS
Introduction In previous posts I have discussed general issues regarding parallel MCMC and examined in detail parallel Monte Carlo on a multicore laptop. In those posts I used the C programming language in conjunction with the MPI parallel library in order to illustrate the concepts. In this post I want to take the example from […]
Introduction In previous posts I have discussed general issues regarding parallel MCMC and examined in detail parallel Monte Carlo on a multicore laptop. In those posts I used the C programming language in conjunction with the MPI parallel library in order to illustrate the concepts. In this post I want to take the example from … Continue reading Parallel Monte Carlo using Scala
There has been a lot of discussion on-line recently about languages for data analysis, statistical computing, and data science more generally. I don’t really want to go into the detail of why I believe that all of the common choices are fundamentally and unfixably flawed – language wars are so unseemly. Instead I want to […]
There has been a lot of discussion on-line recently about languages for data analysis, statistical computing, and data science more generally. I don’t really want to go into the detail of why I believe that all of the common choices are fundamentally and unfixably flawed – language wars are so unseemly. Instead I want to […]
I’ve written a few posts now about using parallel tempering to sample from complicated multi-modal target distributions but there are also other benefits and uses to this algorithm. There is a nice post on Darren Wilkinson’s blog about using tempered posteriors for marginal likelihood calculations. There is also another area where parallel tempering finds application, […] The post Stochastic Optimization in R by Parallel Tempering appeared first on I've Moved!…
My office computer recently got a really nice upgrade and now I have 8 cores on my desktop to play with. I also at the same time received some code for a Gibbs sampler written in R from my adviser. I wanted to try a metropolis-coupled markov chain monte carlo, , algorithm on it to […] The post Parallel Tempering in R with Rmpi appeared first on I've Moved! Click…
Introduction In the previous post I showed that it is possible to couple parallel tempered MCMC chains in order to improve mixing. Such methods can be used when the target of interest is a Bayesian posterior distribution that is difficult to sample. There are (at least) a couple of obvious ways that one can temper […]
Introduction In the previous post I showed that it is possible to couple parallel tempered MCMC chains in order to improve mixing. Such methods can be used when the target of interest is a Bayesian posterior distribution that is difficult to sample. There are (at least) a couple of obvious ways that one can temper […]
