Related papers: Importance Tempering
Bayesian methods are critical for quantifying the behaviors of systems. They capture our uncertainty about a system's behavior using probability distributions and update this understanding as new information becomes available. Probabilistic…
Iterated sampling importance resampling (i-SIR) is a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm which is based on $N$ independent proposals. As $N$ grows, its samples become nearly independent, but with an increased computational cost. We…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods for sampling probability density functions (combined with abundant computational resources) have transformed the sciences, especially in performing probabilistic inferences, or fitting models to data.…
We show that for any multiple-try Metropolis algorithm, one can always accept the proposal and evaluate the importance weight that is needed to correct for the bias without extra computational cost. This results in a general, convenient,…
Variational inference approximates the posterior distribution of a probabilistic model with a parameterized density by maximizing a lower bound for the model evidence. Modern solutions fit a flexible approximation with stochastic gradient…
The normalizing constant plays an important role in Bayesian computation, and there is a large literature on methods for computing or approximating normalizing constants that cannot be evaluated in closed form. When the normalizing constant…
In many stochastic problems, the output of interest depends on an input random vector mainly through a single random variable (or index) via an appropriate univariate transformation of the input. We exploit this feature by proposing an…
In solving simulation-based stochastic root-finding or optimization problems that involve rare events, such as in extreme quantile estimation, running crude Monte Carlo can be prohibitively inefficient. To address this issue, importance…
Estimating the probability that a sum of random variables (RVs) exceeds a given threshold is a well-known challenging problem. Closed-form expression of the sum distribution is usually intractable and presents an open problem. A crude Monte…
Slice sampling is a well-established Markov chain Monte Carlo method for (approximate) sampling of target distributions which are only known up to a normalizing constant. The method is based on choosing a new state on a slice, i.e., a…
This paper proposes niching importance sampling, a framework that combines concepts from reliability analysis, e.g. Markov chains, importance sampling, and relative cross entropy minimisation, with niching techniques from evolutionary…
Simulation Based Calibration (SBC) is applied to analyse two commonly used, competing Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms for estimating the posterior distribution of a stochastic volatility model. In particular, the bespoke 'off-set…
Many Monte Carlo (MC) and importance sampling (IS) methods use mixture models (MMs) for their simplicity and ability to capture multimodal distributions. Recently, subtractive mixture models (SMMs), i.e. MMs with negative coefficients, have…
Statistical model checking avoids the exponential growth of states associated with probabilistic model checking by estimating properties from multiple executions of a system and by giving results within confidence bounds. Rare properties…
Interactive segmentation has gained significant attention for its application in human-computer interaction and data annotation. To address the target scale variation issue in interactive segmentation, a novel multi-scale token adaptation…
The simulation of rare events is one of the key problems in atomistic simulations. Towards its solution a plethora of methods have been proposed. Here we combine two such methods metadynamics and inte-grated tempering sampling. In…
Adaptive importance sampling is a widely spread Monte Carlo technique that uses a re-weighting strategy to iteratively estimate the so-called target distribution. A major drawback of adaptive importance sampling is the large variance of the…
Importance sampling is a popular method for efficient computation of various properties of a distribution such as probabilities, expectations, quantiles etc. The output of an importance sampling algorithm can be represented as a weighted…
Bayesian data analysis is widely used across many disciplines, and representative examples in materials science include spectral analysis and sparse modeling. In such applications, the underlying models often become complex and yield…
This paper describes an algorithm for selecting parameter values (e.g. temperature values) at which to measure equilibrium properties with Parallel Tempering Monte Carlo simulation. Simple approaches to choosing parameter values can lead to…