Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is an established approach for uncertainty quantification and propagation in scientific applications. A key challenge in applying MCMC to scientific domains is computation: the target density of interest is often a function of expensive computations, such as a high-fidelity physical simulation, an intractable integral, or a slowly-converging iterative algorithm. Thus, using an MCMC algorithms with an expensive target density becomes impractical, as these expensive computations need to be evaluated at each iteration of the algorithm.

In this paper, we propose to use the concept of local fairness for auditing and ranking redistricting plans. Given a redistricting plan, a deviating group is a population-balanced contiguous region in which a majority of individuals are of the same interest and in the minority of their respective districts; such a set of individuals have a justified complaint with how the redistricting plan was drawn. A redistricting plan with no deviating groups is called locally fair. We show that the problem of auditing a given plan for local fairness is NP-complete. We present an MCMC approach for auditing as well as ranking redistricting plans. We also present a dynamic programming based algorithm for the auditing problem that we use to demonstrate the efficacy of our MCMC approach. Using these tools, we test local fairness on real-world election data, showing that it is indeed possible to find plans that are almost or exactly locally fair. Further, we show that such plans can be generated while sacrificing very little in terms of compactness and existing fairness measures such as competitiveness of the districts or seat shares of the plans.

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is an established approach for uncertainty quantification and propagation in scientific applications. A key challenge in applying MCMC to scientific domains is computation: the target density of interest is often a function of expensive computations, such as a high-fidelity physical simulation, an intractable integral, or a slowly-converging iterative algorithm. Thus, using an MCMC algorithms with an expensive target density becomes impractical, as these expensive computations need to be evaluated at each iteration of the algorithm. Multi-fidelity MCMC algorithms combine models of varying fidelities in order to obtain an approximate target density with lower computational cost. In this paper, we describe a class of asymptotically exact multi-fidelity MCMC algorithms for the setting where a sequence of models of increasing fidelity can be computed that approximates the expensive target density of interest. We take a pseudo-marginal MCMC approach for multi-fidelity inference that utilizes a cheaper, randomized-fidelity unbiased estimator of the target fidelity constructed via random truncation of a telescoping series of the low-fidelity sequence of models.

In this paper, we propose to use the concept of local fairness for auditing and ranking redistricting plans. Given a redistricting plan, a deviating group is a population-balanced contiguous region in which a majority of individuals are of the same interest and in the minority of their respective districts; such a set of individuals have a justified complaint with how the redistricting plan was drawn. A redistricting plan with no deviating groups is called locally fair. We show that the problem of auditing a given plan for local fairness is NP-complete. We present an MCMC approach for auditing as well as ranking redistricting plans.

There are many hierarchical clustering algorithms available, but these lack a firm statistical basis. Here we set up a hierarchical probabilistic mixture model, where data is generated in a hierarchical tree-structured manner. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are demonstrated which can be used to sample from the posterior distribution over trees containing variable numbers of hidden units.

This paper presents a new approach to a robust Gaussian process (GP) regression. Most existing approaches replace an outlier-prone Gaussian likelihood with a non-Gaussian likelihood induced from a heavy tail distribution, such as the Laplace distribution and Student-t distribution. However, the use of a non-Gaussian likelihood would incur the need for a computationally expensive Bayesian approximate computation in the posterior inferences. The proposed approach models an outlier as a noisy and biased observation of an unknown regression function, and accordingly, the likelihood contains bias terms to explain the degree of deviations from the regression function. We entail how the biases can be estimated accurately with other hyperparameters by a regularized maximum likelihood estimation. Conditioned on the bias estimates, the robust GP regression can be reduced to a standard GP regression problem with analytical forms of the predictive mean and variance estimates. Therefore, the proposed approach is simple and very computationally attractive. It also gives a very robust and accurate GP estimate for many tested scenarios. For the numerical evaluation, we perform a comprehensive simulation study to evaluate the proposed approach with the comparison to the existing robust GP approaches under various simulated scenarios of different outlier proportions and different noise levels. The approach is applied to data from two measurement systems, where the predictors are based on robust environmental parameter measurements and the response variables utilize more complex chemical sensing methods that contain a certain percentage of outliers. The utility of the measurement systems and value of the environmental data are improved through the computationally efficient GP regression and bias model.

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 Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. The motivation is that, compared to standard optimization of kernel parameters, they have been systematically demonstrated to be superior in quantifying uncertainty in predictions. Recently, the Pseudo-Marginal MCMC approach has been proposed as a practical inference tool for GP models. In particular, it amounts in replacing the analytically intractable marginal likelihood by an unbiased estimate obtainable by approximate methods and importance sampling. After discussing the potential drawbacks in employing importance sampling, this paper proposes the application of annealed importance sampling. The results empirically demonstrate that compared to importance sampling, annealed importance sampling can reduce the variance of the estimate of the marginal likelihood exponentially in the number of data at a computational cost that scales only polynomially. The results on real data demonstrate that employing annealed importance sampling in the Pseudo-Marginal MCMC approach represents a step forward in the development of fully automated exact inference engines for GP models.

Diffusion processes are a family of continuous-time continuous-state stochastic processes that are in general only partially observed. The joint estimation of the forcing parameters and the system noise (volatility) in these dynamical systems is a crucial, but non-trivial task, especially when the system is nonlinear and multi-modal. We propose a variational treatment of diffusion processes, which allows us to estimate these parameters by simple gradient techniques and which is computationally less demanding than most MCMC approaches. Furthermore, our parameter inference scheme does not break down when the time step gets smaller, unlike most current approaches. Finally, we show how a cheap estimate of the posterior over the parameters can be constructed based on the variational free energy.

There are many hierarchical clustering algorithms available, but these lack a firm statistical basis. Here we set up a hierarchical probabilistic mixture model, where data is generated in a hierarchical tree-structured manner. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are demonstrated which can be used to sample from the posterior distribution over trees containing variable numbers of hidden units.

There are many hierarchical clustering algorithms available, but these lack a firm statistical basis. Here we set up a hierarchical probabilistic mixture model, where data is generated in a hierarchical tree-structured manner. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are demonstrated which can be used to sample from the posterior distribution over trees containing variable numbers of hidden units.