Related papers: A vanilla Rao--Blackwellization of Metropolis--Has…
This paper generalizes the notion of sufficiency for estimation problems beyond maximum likelihood. In particular, we consider estimation problems based on Jones et al. and Basu et al. likelihood functions that are popular among…
The Hastings algorithm is a key tool in computational science. While mathematically justified by detailed balance, it can be conceptually difficult to grasp. Here, we present two complementary and intuitive ways to derive and understand the…
Couplings play a central role in the analysis of Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms and appear increasingly often in the algorithms themselves, e.g. in convergence diagnostics, parallelization, and variance reduction techniques. Existing…
Can we make Bayesian posterior MCMC sampling more efficient when faced with very large datasets? We argue that computing the likelihood for N datapoints in the Metropolis-Hastings (MH) test to reach a single binary decision is…
We consider Metropolis Hastings MCMC in cases where the log of the ratio of target distributions is replaced by an estimator. The estimator is based on m samples from an independent online Monte Carlo simulation. Under some conditions on…
Various Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are studied to improve upon random walk Metropolis sampling, for simulation from complex distributions. Examples include Metropolis-adjusted Langevin algorithms, Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, and…
We construct a new Markov chain Monte Carlo method on finite states with optimal choices of acceptance-rejection ratio functions. We prove that the constructed continuous time Markov jumping process has a global in-time convergence rate in…
When an unbiased estimator of the likelihood is used within a Metropolis--Hastings chain, it is necessary to trade off the number of Monte Carlo samples used to construct this estimator against the asymptotic variances of averages computed…
Acceptance-rejection (AR), Independent Metropolis Hastings (IMH) or importance sampling (IS) Monte Carlo (MC) simulation algorithms all involve computing ratios of probability density functions (pdfs). On the other hand, classifiers…
Bayesian modelling and computational inference by Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a principled framework for large-scale uncertainty quantification, though is limited in practice by computational cost when implemented in the simplest…
In this paper we propose to evaluate and compare Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods to estimate the parameters in a generalized extreme value model. We employed the Bayesian approach using traditional Metropolis-Hastings methods,…
Poisson log-linear models are ubiquitous in many applications, and one of the most popular approaches for parametric count regression. In the Bayesian context, however, there are no sufficient specific computational tools for efficient…
We introduce a modification of the well-known Metropolis importance sampling algorithm by using a methodology inspired on the consideration of the reparametrization invariance of the microcanonical ensemble. The most important feature of…
Markov chain Monte Carlo methods are often deemed too computationally intensive to be of any practical use for big data applications, and in particular for inference on datasets containing a large number $n$ of individual data points, also…
For a wide class of applications of the Monte Carlo method, we describe a general sampling methodology that is guaranteed to converge to a specified equilibrium distribution function. The method is distinct from that of Metropolis in that…
In this paper we address the problem of the prohibitively large computational cost of existing Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for large--scale applications with high dimensional parameter spaces, e.g. in uncertainty quantification in…
The Random Walk Metropolis (RWM) algorithm is a Metropolis- Hastings MCMC algorithm designed to sample from a given target distribution \pi with Lebesgue density on R^N. RWM constructs a Markov chain by randomly proposing a new position…
Completely automatic and adaptive non-parametric inference is a pie in the sky. The frequentist approach, best exemplified by the kernel estimators, has excellent asymptotic characteristics but it is very sensitive to the choice of…
Shielding studies in neutron transport, with Monte Carlo codes, yield challenging problems of small-probability estimation. The particularity of these studies is that the small probability to estimate is formulated in terms of the…
We present a new multiple-try Metropolis-Hastings algorithm designed to be especially beneficial when a tailored proposal distribution is available. The algorithm is based on a given acyclic graph $G$, where one of the nodes in $G$, $k$…