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An irreversible Markov-chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm with skew detailed balance conditions originally proposed by Turitsyn et al. is extended to general discrete systems on the basis of the Metropolis-Hastings scheme. To evaluate the…
Traditional MCMC algorithms are computationally intensive and do not scale well to large data. In particular, the Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithm requires passing over the entire dataset to evaluate the likelihood ratio in each…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is an efficient method of simulating smooth distributions and has motivated the widely used No-U-turn Sampler (NUTS) and software Stan. We build on NUTS and the technique of "unbiased sampling" to design HMC…
Recent developments in big data and analytics research have produced an abundance of large data sets that are too big to be analyzed in their entirety, due to limits on computer memory or storage capacity. To address these issues,…
We investigate how ideas from covariance localization in numerical weather prediction can be used in Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling of high-dimensional posterior distributions arising in Bayesian inverse problems. To localize an…
Markov chain sampling methods that automatically adapt to characteristics of the distribution being sampled can be constructed by exploiting the principle that one can sample from a distribution by sampling uniformly from the region under…
We introduce a new Markov-Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach designed for efficient sampling of highly correlated and multimodal posteriors. Parallel tempering, though effective, is a costly technique for sampling such posteriors. Our…
The Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithm is the prototype for a class of Markov chain Monte Carlo methods that propose transitions between states and then accept or reject the proposal. These methods generate a correlated sequence of random…
Generalized linear mixed models (GLMMs) are often used for analyzing correlated non-Gaussian data. The likelihood function in a GLMM is available only as a high dimensional integral, and thus closed-form inference and prediction are not…
This paper introduces a concept of approximate spectral gap to analyze the mixing time of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms for which the usual spectral gap is degenerate or almost degenerate. We use the idea to analyze a class of…
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,…
As it has become common to use many computer cores in routine applications, finding good ways to parallelize popular algorithms has become increasingly important. In this paper, we present a parallelization scheme for Markov chain Monte…
Latent position network models are a versatile tool in network science; applications include clustering entities, controlling for causal confounders, and defining priors over unobserved graphs. Estimating each node's latent position is…
Traditional Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods suffer from low acceptance rate, slow mixing and low efficiency in high dimensions. Hamiltonian Monte Carlo resolves this issue by avoiding the random walk. Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a…
There has been considerable interest in making Bayesian inference more scalable. In big data settings, most literature focuses on reducing the computing time per iteration, with less focused on reducing the number of iterations needed in…
In the last few decades, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have been widely applied to Bayesian updating of structural dynamic models in the field of structural health monitoring. Recently, several MCMC algorithms have been developed…
Couplings play a central role in contemporary Markov chain Monte Carlo methods and in the analysis of their convergence to stationarity. In most cases, a coupling must induce relatively fast meeting between chains to ensure good…
We propose a new Monte Carlo method for sampling from multimodal distributions. The idea of this technique is based on splitting the task into two: finding the modes of a target distribution $\pi$ and sampling, given the knowledge of the…
There is a tension between robustness and efficiency when designing Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling algorithms. Here we focus on robustness with respect to tuning parameters, showing that more sophisticated algorithms tend to be…
Markov chain Monte Carlo methods are a powerful tool for sampling equilibrium configurations in complex systems. One problem these methods often face is slow convergence over large energy barriers. In this work, we propose a novel method…