Related papers: The pseudo-marginal approach for efficient Monte C…
Sampling from posterior distributions using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods can require an exhaustive number of iterations, particularly when the posterior is multi-modal as the MCMC sampler can become trapped in a local mode for a…
Random sampling of graph partitions under constraints has become a popular tool for evaluating legislative redistricting plans. Analysts detect partisan gerrymandering by comparing a proposed redistricting plan with an ensemble of sampled…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms provide a very general recipe for estimating properties of complicated distributions. While their use has become commonplace and there is a large literature on MCMC theory and practice, MCMC users…
We propose sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods for sampling the posterior distribution of state-space models under highly informative observation regimes, a situation in which standard SMC methods can perform poorly. A special case is…
Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods are a class of techniques to sample approximately from any sequence of probability distributions using a combination of importance sampling and resampling steps. This paper is concerned with the…
Gaussian processes (GPs) are frequently used in machine learning and statistics to construct powerful models. However, when employing GPs in practice, important considerations must be made, regarding the high computational burden,…
The pseudo-marginal algorithm is a popular variant of the Metropolis--Hastings scheme which allows us to sample asymptotically from a target probability density $\pi$, when we are only able to estimate an unnormalized version of $\pi$…
The random numbers driving Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation are usually modeled as independent U(0,1) random variables. Tribble [Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms using completely uniformly distributed driving sequences (2007)…
Recently, Stochastic Gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (SG-MCMC) methods have been proposed for scaling up Monte Carlo computations to large data problems. Whilst these approaches have proven useful in many applications, vanilla SG-MCMC…
Estimating failure probabilities of engineering systems is an important problem in many engineering fields. In this work we consider such problems where the failure probability is extremely small (e.g $\leq10^{-10}$). In this case, standard…
In this paper, we propose an efficient pseudo-marginal Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling approach to draw samples from posterior shape distributions for image segmentation. The computation time of the proposed approach is independent…
Monte Carlo simulations are one of the major tools in statistical physics, complex system science, and other fields, and an increasing number of these simulations is run on distributed systems like clusters or grids. This raises the issue…
The Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm is a widely recognised as an efficient method for sampling a specified posterior distribution. However, when the posterior is multi-modal, conventional MCMC algorithms either tend to become…
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…
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…
We design and implement a novel algorithm for computing a multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) estimator of the cumulative distribution function of a quantity of interest in problems with random input parameters or initial conditions. Our approach…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a powerful methodology for the approximation of posterior distributions. However, the iterative nature of MCMC does not naturally facilitate its use with modern highly parallel computation on HPC and cloud…
Traditionally, the field of computational Bayesian statistics has been divided into two main subfields: variational methods and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). In recent years, however, several methods have been proposed based on combining…
Sequential Monte Carlo methods, also known as particle methods, are a popular set of techniques for approximating high-dimensional probability distributions and their normalizing constants. These methods have found numerous applications in…
We describe an embarrassingly parallel, anytime Monte Carlo method for likelihood-free models. The algorithm starts with the view that the stochasticity of the pseudo-samples generated by the simulator can be controlled externally by a…