{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/scalable-nonparametric-sampling-from","title":"Scalable Nonparametric Sampling from Multimodal Posteriors with the Posterior Bootstrap","arxiv_id":"1902.03175","date":"2019-02-08","proceeding":null,"authors":["Edwin Fong","Simon Lyddon","Chris Holmes"],"abstract":"Increasingly complex datasets pose a number of challenges for Bayesian inference. Conventional posterior sampling based on Markov chain Monte Carlo can be too computationally intensive, is serial in nature and mixes poorly between posterior modes. Further, all models are misspecified, which brings into question the validity of the conventional Bayesian update. We present a scalable Bayesian nonparametric learning routine that enables posterior sampling through the optimization of suitably randomized objective functions. A Dirichlet process prior on the unknown data distribution accounts for model misspecification, and admits an embarrassingly parallel posterior bootstrap algorithm that generates independent and exact samples from the nonparametric posterior distribution. Our method is particularly adept at sampling from multimodal posterior distributions via a random restart mechanism. We demonstrate our method on Gaussian mixture model and sparse logistic regression examples.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.03175v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.03175v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"scalable-nonparametric-sampling-from","repo_url":"https://github.com/edfong/npl","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"bayesian-inference","task_name":"Bayesian Inference"},{"task_slug":"regression-1","task_name":"regression"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"logistic-regression","method_name":"Logistic Regression"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=1902.03175","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"1902.03175"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/edfong/npl","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran_draft_wrong":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"e9e384ae7ccd863f","entry":"load_data","repo":"edfong/npl","repo_kind":"official","path":"experiments/Toy_GMM/run_NPL_toygmm.py","file_url":"https://github.com/edfong/npl/blob/HEAD/experiments/Toy_GMM/run_NPL_toygmm.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_draft_wrong","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"OUTPUT_MISDECLARED","metamorphic_tier":"deterministic","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"BSD-3-Clause","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"e9e384ae7ccd863f"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}