Transport Monte Carlo: High-Accuracy Posterior Approximation via Random Transport

In Bayesian applications, there is a huge interest in rapid and accurate estimation of the posterior distribution, particularly for high dimensional or hierarchical models. In this article, we propose to use optimization to solve for a joint distribution (random transport plan) between two random variables, <i>θ</i> from the posterior distribution and <i>β</i> from the simple multivariate uniform. Specifically, we obtain an approximate estimate of the conditional distribution Π(β|θ) as an infinite mixture of simple location-scale changes; applying the Bayes’ theorem, Π(θ|β) can be sampled as one of the reversed transforms from the uniform, with the weight proportional to the posterior density/mass function. This produces independent random samples with high approximation accuracy, as well as nice theoretical guarantees. Our method shows compelling advantages in performance and accuracy, compared to the state-of-the-art Markov chain Monte Carlo and approximations such as variational Bayes and normalizing flow. We illustrate this approach via several challenging applications, such as sampling from multi-modal distribution, estimating sparse signals in high dimension, and soft-thresholding of a graph with a prior on the degrees. Supplementary materials for this article, including the source code and additional comparison with popular alternative algorithms are available on the journal website.