Related papers: Retrospective Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods such as Gibbs sampling are finding widespread use in applied statistics and machine learning. These often lead to difficult computational problems, which are increasingly being solved on parallel and…
We introduce a generalised micro-macro Markov chain Monte Carlo (mM-MCMC) method with pseudo-marginal approximation to the free energy, that is able to accelerate sampling of the microscopic Gibbs distributions when there is a time-scale…
Nonparametric mixture models based on the Dirichlet process are an elegant alternative to finite models when the number of underlying components is unknown, but inference in such models can be slow. Existing attempts to parallelize…
Bayesian hierarchical modeling is a popular approach to capturing unobserved heterogeneity across individual units. However, standard estimation methods such as Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) can be impracticable for modeling outcomes from…
This paper considers a new approach to using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) in contexts where one may adopt multilevel (ML) Monte Carlo. The underlying problem is to approximate expectations w.r.t. an underlying probability measure that is…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are foundational algorithms for Bayesian inference and probabilistic modeling. However, most MCMC algorithms are inherently sequential and their time complexity scales linearly with the sequence…
Monte Carlo methods -- such as Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and piecewise deterministic Markov process (PDMP) samplers -- provide asymptotically exact estimators of expectations under a target distribution. There is growing interest in…
Traditional Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling of hidden Markov models (HMMs) involves latent states underlying an imperfect observation process, and generates posterior samples for top-level parameters concurrently with nuisance…
Particle Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods are used to carry out inference in non-linear and non-Gaussian state space models, where the posterior density of the states is approximated using particles. Current approaches usually perform…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are employed to sample from a given distribution of interest, whenever either the distribution does not exist in closed form, or, if it does, no efficient method to simulate an independent sample from…
Gibbs sampling is a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method often used in Bayesian learning. MCMC methods can be difficult to deploy on parallel and distributed systems due to their inherently sequential nature. We study asynchronous Gibbs…
Closed-form stochastic filtering equations can be derived in a general setting where probability distributions are replaced by some specific outer measures. In this article, we study how the principles of the sequential Monte Carlo method…
Evaluating the degree of partisan districting (Gerrymandering) in a statistical framework typically requires an ensemble of districting plans which are drawn from a prescribed probability distribution that adheres to a realistic and…
We propose a sequential Markov chain Monte Carlo (SMCMC) algorithm to sample from a sequence of probability distributions, corresponding to posterior distributions at different times in on-line applications. SMCMC proceeds as in usual MCMC…
Dirichlet Process Mixture Models (DPMMs) are widely used to address clustering problems. Their main advantage lies in their ability to automatically estimate the number of clusters during the inference process through the Bayesian…
We develop a modular approach to Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling for unnormalized target densities. In this approach, Markov chains are constructed in parallel, each constrained to a subset of the target space. The Monte Carlo…
We introduce a new Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampler called the Markov Interacting Importance Sampler (MIIS). The MIIS sampler uses conditional importance sampling (IS) approximations to jointly sample the current state of the Markov…
As Gaussian processes are used to answer increasingly complex questions, analytic solutions become scarcer and scarcer. Monte Carlo methods act as a convenient bridge for connecting intractable mathematical expressions with actionable…
Markov chain Monte Carlo is an inherently serial algorithm. Although likelihood calculations for individual steps can sometimes be parallelized, the serial evolution of the process is widely viewed as incompatible with parallelization,…
Recent advances in stochastic gradient variational inference have made it possible to perform variational Bayesian inference with posterior approximations containing auxiliary random variables. This enables us to explore a new synthesis of…