Related papers: Sampling using a `bank' of clues
Sampling-based algorithms are widely used for motion planning in high-dimensional configuration spaces. However, due to low sampling efficiency, their performance often diminishes in complex configuration spaces with narrow corridors.…
High-dimensional limit theorems have been shown useful to derive tuning rules for finding the optimal scaling in random-walk Metropolis algorithms. The assumptions under which weak convergence results are proved are however restrictive: the…
This paper describes a Bayesian method for learning causal networks using samples that were selected in a non-random manner from a population of interest. Examples of data obtained by non-random sampling include convenience samples and…
Monte-Carlo techniques are standard numerical tools for exploring non-Gaussian and multivariate likelihoods. Many variants of the original Metropolis-Hastings algorithm have been proposed to increase the sampling efficiency. Motivated by…
Sampling-based motion planning is the predominant paradigm in many real-world robotic applications, but its performance is immensely dependent on the quality of the samples. The majority of traditional planners are inefficient as they use…
This work develops a powerful and versatile framework for determining acceptance ratios in Metropolis-Hastings type Markov kernels widely used in statistical sampling problems. Our approach allows us to derive new classes of kernels which…
Markov chain Monte Carlo methods have become standard tools in statistics to sample from complex probability measures. Many available techniques rely on discrete-time reversible Markov chains whose transition kernels build up over the…
Bayesian model selection provides the cosmologist with an exacting tool to distinguish between competing models based purely on the data, via the Bayesian evidence. Previous methods to calculate this quantity either lacked general…
This work explores a novel perspective on solving nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization problems by leveraging sampling based methods. Instead of treating the objective function purely through traditional (often deterministic) optimization…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are routinely used to draw samples from distributions with intractable normalization constants. However, standard MCMC algorithms do not apply to doubly-intractable distributions in which there are…
The ability to generate samples of the random effects from their conditional distributions is fundamental for inference in mixed effects models. Random walk Metropolis is widely used to perform such sampling, but this method is known to…
Sequential sampling occurs when the entire population is not known in advance and data are obtained one at a time or in groups of units. This manuscript proposes a new algorithm to sequentially select a balanced sample. The algorithm…
We develop a new sampling method to estimate eigenvector centrality on incomplete networks. Our goal is to estimate this global centrality measure having at disposal a limited amount of data. This is the case in many real-world scenarios…
Consider the problem of approximating a given probability distribution on the cube $[0,1]^n$ via the use of a square lattice discretization with mesh-size $1/N$ and the Metropolis algorithm. Here the dimension $n$ is fixed and we focus for…
There is a wide variety of data mining methods available, and it is generally useful in exploratory data analysis to use many different methods for the same dataset. This, however, leads to the problem of whether the results found by one…
Lifted samplers form a class of Markov chain Monte Carlo methods which has drawn a lot attention in recent years due to superior performance in challenging Bayesian applications. A canonical example of lifted samplers is the one that is…
The Metropolis-Hastings algorithm allows one to sample asymptotically from any probability distribution $\pi$. There has been recently much work devoted to the development of variants of the MH update which can handle scenarios where such…
Efficient extraction of useful knowledge from these data is still a challenge, mainly when the data is distributed, heterogeneous and of different quality depending on its corresponding local infrastructure. To reduce the overhead cost,…
The Metropolis-Hastings algorithm is a fundamental Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method for sampling and inference. With the advent of Big Data, distributed and parallel variants of MCMC methods are attracting increased attention. In this…
Nowadays, huge amounts of data are naturally collected in distributed sites due to different facts and moving these data through the network for extracting useful knowledge is almost unfeasible for either technical reasons or policies.…