$\mathbb{P}$robably Approximately Wrong

An infrequent blog, by Nicola Branchini

Recent posts

Feb 23, 2023
Why do sampling and estimating the normalizing constant avoid each other? We want to get samples from $p(\mathbf{x})$, exactly or approximately. Except for some cases (and for inverse transform sampling), in general, it does not matter at all whether we know the normalizing constant of $p$, i.…
Nov 8, 2022
Simple Monte Carlo is independent of dimension. Or is it ? * IMPORTANT NOTE: there was a bug in the original example, thanks to Philipp Hennig for pointing it out, I have now fixed it.…
May 26, 2022
Combining independent and unbiased estimators I came across this 1.25 page paper by Don Rubin and Sanford Weisberg (Rubin & Weisberg) in Biometrika from 1975.…
Feb 6, 2020
Sequential Monte Carlo and Improved Auxiliary Particle Filters In this post, my aims are: Introduce Bayesian inference in state space models Introduce approximate inference using importance sampling, in state space models.…