Related papers: Importance Tempering
Two important enhanced sampling algorithms, simulated (ST) and parallel (PT) tempering, are commonly used when ergodic simulations may be hard to achieve, e.g, due to a phase space separated by large free-energy barriers. This is so for…
To improve the efficiency of Monte Carlo estimation, practitioners are turning to biased Markov chain Monte Carlo procedures that trade off asymptotic exactness for computational speed. The reasoning is sound: a reduction in variance due to…
Stein discrepancies have emerged as a powerful tool for retrospective improvement of Markov chain Monte Carlo output. However, the question of how to design Markov chains that are well-suited to such post-processing has yet to be addressed.…
The importance sampling (IS) method lies at the core of many Monte Carlo-based techniques. IS allows the approximation of a target probability distribution by drawing samples from a proposal (or importance) distribution, different from the…
State-space models have been used in many applications, including econometrics, engineering, medical research, etc. The maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) of the static parameter of general state-space models is not straightforward because…
Improving efficiency of importance sampler is at the center of research in Monte Carlo methods. While adaptive approach is usually difficult within the Markov Chain Monte Carlo framework, the counterpart in importance sampling can be…
This paper proposes a new Sequential Monte Carlo algorithm to perform online estimation in the context of state space models when either the transition density of the latent state or the conditional likelihood of an observation given a…
The problem of finding the expected value of a statistic of a locally stable point process in a bounded region is addressed. We propose an adaptive importance sampling for solving the problem. In our proposal, we restrict the importance…
Simulated tempering is a widely used strategy for sampling from multimodal distributions. In this paper, we consider simulated tempering combined with an arbitrary local Markov chain Monte Carlo sampler and present a new decomposition…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are frequently used to approximately simulate high-dimensional, multimodal probability distributions. In adaptive MCMC methods, the transition kernel is changed "on the fly" in the hope to speed up…
Importance sampling is a rare event simulation technique used in Monte Carlo simulations to bias the sampling distribution towards the rare event of interest. By assigning appropriate weights to sampled points, importance sampling allows…
We propose a method to efficiently integrate truncated probability densities. The method uses Markov chain Monte Carlo method to sample from a probability density matching the function being integrated. The required normalisation or…
Nested sampling is a simulation method for approximating marginal likelihoods proposed by Skilling (2006). We establish that nested sampling has an approximation error that vanishes at the standard Monte Carlo rate and that this error is…
Tempering is a popular tool in Bayesian computation, being used to transform a posterior distribution $p_1$ into a reference distribution $p_0$ that is more easily approximated. Several algorithms exist that start by approximating $p_0$ and…
In Bayesian inference, we seek to compute information about random variables such as moments or quantiles on the basis of {available data} and prior information. When the distribution of random variables is {intractable}, Monte Carlo (MC)…
New sampling algorithms based on simulating continuous-time stochastic processes called piece-wise deterministic Markov processes (PDMPs) have shown considerable promise. However, these methods can struggle to sample from multi-modal or…
Estimating the parameters of compact binaries which coalesce and produce gravitational waves is a challenging Bayesian inverse problem. Gravitational-wave parameter estimation lies within the class of multifidelity problems, where a variety…
We introduce a new class of sequential Monte Carlo methods which reformulates the essence of the nested sampling method of Skilling (2006) in terms of sequential Monte Carlo techniques. Two new algorithms are proposed, nested sampling via…
Importance sampling (IS) consists in biasing samples from a distribution $f$ towards another distribution $g$. Concretely, given samples $X_i$ from $f$, the IS measure is $$\hat{g}_n = \frac{1}{Z_n}\sum_{i=1}^n \frac{g(X_i)}{f(X_i)}…
Statisticians often use Monte Carlo methods to approximate probability distributions, primarily with Markov chain Monte Carlo and importance sampling. Sequential Monte Carlo samplers are a class of algorithms that combine both techniques to…