Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Efficient sampling from high-dimensional, multi-modal posteriors is a central challenge in Bayesian inference across the physical sciences. Gravitational-wave (GW) astronomy, where likelihood evaluations are computationally expensive and posteriors are complex, is one application motivating this work. Popular families of methods like Markov-chain Monte Carlo, Snested sampling, and importance sampling (IS) all rely on proposal distributions to guide exploration. Because prior knowledge of the target is often limited, practitioners can adopt adaptive proposals that iteratively refine themselves using information gained from previously drawn samples. Traditional adaptive strategies, however, struggle in high-dimensional multi-modal settings: complex, non-linear correlations are hard to capture, and hyperparameters typically require tedious, problem-specific tuning. To address these issues, we introduce parallel adaptive reweighting IS (PARIS; descriptively, 'seed sampling'). PARIS models its proposal as a Gaussian mixture whose component centers are the existing samples and whose component weights match the current importance weights. New draws from the proposal therefore concentrate around high-weight regions, while candidate points in unexplored areas receive intentionally inflated weights. As the algorithm continuously reweights all samples up to the latest proposal, any initial over-weighting self-corrects once additional neighbor samples are collected. To enable rapid reweighting, we present an efficient update scheme and evaluate PARIS on illustrative toy problems and more realistic GW parameter estimation tasks. PARIS achieves accurate posterior reconstruction and evidence estimation with substantially fewer function evaluations than competing approaches, highlighting its promise for widespread use in astrophysical data analysis.
Source: Reports on Progress in Physics
Authors: Miaoxin Liu, Alvin J K Chua
Institution: National University of Singapore
Language: English
Subfield: Statistics and Probability
Field: Mathematics
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $4,680
Funder: National University of Singapore
OpenAlex ID: W7140196824
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