A new, general approach is described for approximate inference in first-order probabilistic languages, using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques in the space of concrete possible worlds underlying any given knowledge base. The simplicity of the approach and its lazy construction of possible worlds make it possible to consider quite expressive languages. In particular, we consider two ext...

This paper presents a new glottal inverse filtering (GIF) method that utilizes Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm. First, initial estimates of the vocal tract and glottal flow are evaluated by an existing GIF method, the iterative adaptive inverse filtering (IAIF). Simultaneously, the initially estimated glottal flow is synthesized using the Klatt model and filtered with the estimated vo...

In this paper we present a novel approach for human Body configuration based on the Silhouette. We propose to address this problem under the Bayesian framework. We use an effective Model based MCMC (Markov Chain Monte Carlo) method to solve the configuration problem, in which the best configuration could be defined as MAP (maximize a posteriori probability) in Bayesian model. This model based M...

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) routines have become a fundamental means for generating random variates from distributions otherwise difficult to sample. The Hastings sampler, which includes the Gibbs and Metropolis samplers as special cases, is the most popular MCMC method. A number of implementations are available for running these MCMC routines varying in the order through which the componen...

With the rapidly growing scales of statistical problems, subset based communicationfree parallel MCMC methods are a promising future for large scale Bayesian analysis. In this article, we propose a new Weierstrass sampler for parallel MCMC based on independent subsets. The new sampler approximates the full data posterior samples via combining the posterior draws from independent subset MCMC cha...

Conditional random fields and other graphical models have achieved state of the art results in a variety of tasks such as coreference, relation extraction, data integration, and parsing. Increasingly, practitioners are using models with more complex structure—higher treewidth, larger fan-out, more features, and more data—rendering even approximate inference methods such as MCMC inefficient. In ...

A key challenge for cognitive psychology is the investigation of mental representations, such as object categories, subjective probabilities, choice utilities, and memory traces. In many cases, these representations can be expressed as a non-negative function defined over a set of objects. We present a behavioral method for estimating these functions. Our approach uses people as components of a...

Conditional random fields and other graphical models have achieved state of the art results in a variety of NLP and IE tasks including coreference and relation extraction. Increasingly, practitioners are using models with more complex structure—higher tree-width, larger fanout, more features, and more data—rendering even approximate inference methods such as MCMC inefficient. In this paper we p...

The use of Bayesian inference for the analysis of complex statistical models has increased dramatically in recent years, in part due to the increasing availability of computing power. There are a range of techniques available for carrying out Bayesian inference, but the lack of analytic tractability for the vast majority of models of interest means that most of the techniques are numeric, and m...