Related papers: A characteristic of Bennett's acceptance ratio met…
We analyze the convergence rate of the randomized Newton-like method introduced by Qu et. al. (2016) for smooth and convex objectives, which uses random coordinate blocks of a Hessian-over-approximation matrix $\bM$ instead of the true…
According to the Jarzynski theorem, equilibrium free energy differences can be calculated from the statistics of work carried out during non-equilibrium transformations. Although exact, this approach can be plagued by large statistical…
Rejection Sampling is a fundamental Monte-Carlo method. It is used to sample from distributions admitting a probability density function which can be evaluated exactly at any given point, albeit at a high computational cost. However,…
This paper considers the problem of adaptive estimation of a mean pattern in a randomly shifted curve model. We show that this problem can be transformed into a linear inverse problem, where the density of the random shifts plays the role…
Consider the problem of estimating the mean of a Gaussian random vector when the mean vector is assumed to be in a given convex set. The most natural solution is to take the Euclidean projection of the data vector on to this convex set; in…
Importance sampling is a widely used technique to estimate properties of a distribution. This paper investigates trading-off some bias for variance by adaptively winsorizing the importance sampling estimator. The novel winsorizing…
Free energy difference calculations based on atomistic simulations generally improve in accuracy when sampling from a sequence of intermediate equilibrium thermodynamic states that bridge the configuration space between two states of…
We propose an efficient Monte Carlo method for the computation of the volumes of high-dimensional bodies with arbitrary shape. We start with a region of known volume within the interior of the manifold and then use the multistate Bennett…
The majority of machine learning methods can be regarded as the minimization of an unavailable risk function. To optimize the latter, given samples provided in a streaming fashion, we define a general stochastic Newton algorithm and its…
Umbrella sampling efficiently yields equilibrium averages that depend on exploring rare states of a model by biasing simulations to windows of coordinate values and then combining the resulting data with physical weighting. Here, we…
We present an algorithm to approximate the solutions to variational problems where set of admissible functions consists of convex functions. The main motivator behind this numerical method is estimating solutions to Adverse Selection…
Exact free energy minimization is a convex optimization problem that is usually approximated with stochastic sampling methods. Deterministic approximations have been less successful because many desirable properties have been difficult to…
This paper is committed to investigate an extension of the classical adaptive biasing force method, which is used to compute the free energy related to the Boltzmann-Gibbs measure and a reaction coordinate function. The issue of this…
The Bethe free energy approximation provides an effective way for relaxing NP-hard problems of probabilistic inference. However, its accuracy depends on the model parameters and particularly degrades if a phase transition in the model…
The Jensen inequality is a widely used tool in a multitude of fields, such as for example information theory and machine learning. It can be also used to derive other standard inequalities such as the inequality of arithmetic and geometric…
We develop a fast method for optimally designing experiments in the context of statistical seismic source inversion. In particular, we efficiently compute the optimal number and locations of the receivers or seismographs. The seismic source…
The estimation of a density profile from experimental data points is a challenging problem, usually tackled by plotting a histogram. Prior assumptions on the nature of the density, from its smoothness to the specification of its form, allow…
Conventional inverse optimization inputs a solution and finds the parameters of an optimization model that render a given solution optimal. The literature mostly focuses on inferring the objective function in linear problems when accepted…
We generalize Anderson's orthogonality determinant formula to describe the statistics of work performed on generic disordered, non-interacting fermionic nanograins during quantum quenches. The energy absorbed increases linearly with time,…
Respondent-driven sampling (RDS) is an approach to sampling design and analysis which utilizes the networks of social relationships that connect members of the target population, using chain-referral methods to facilitate sampling. RDS…