English

MCMC for multi-modal distributions

Computation 2025-01-13 v1

Abstract

We explain the fundamental challenges of sampling from multimodal distributions, particularly for high-dimensional problems. We present the major types of MCMC algorithms that are designed for this purpose, including parallel tempering, mode jumping and Wang-Landau, as well as several state-of-the-art approaches that have recently been proposed. We demonstrate these methods using both synthetic and real-world examples of multimodal distributions with discrete or continuous state spaces.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2501.05908,
  title  = {MCMC for multi-modal distributions},
  author = {Krzysztof Łatuszyński and Matthew T. Moores and Timothée Stumpf-Fétizon},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.05908},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Will appear in "Handbook of Markov Chain Monte Carlo", 2nd edition

R2 v1 2026-06-28T21:02:31.610Z