Related papers: Delayed rejection schemes for efficient Markov-Cha…
The efficiency of Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) can suffer when sampling a distribution with a wide range of length scales, because the small step sizes needed for stability in high-curvature regions are inefficient elsewhere. To address…
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…
Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms are used to simulate from complex statistical distributions by way of a local exploration of these distributions. This local feature avoids heavy requests on understanding the nature of the target, but it…
Delayed-acceptance Markov chain Monte Carlo (DA-MCMC) samples from a probability distribution via a two-stages version of the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm, by combining the target distribution with a "surrogate" (i.e. an approximate and…
Efficient sampling of many-dimensional and multimodal density functions is a task of great interest in many research fields. We describe an algorithm that allows parallelizing inherently serial Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling by…
Modern problems in astronomical Bayesian inference require efficient methods for sampling from complex, high-dimensional, often multi-modal probability distributions. Most popular methods, such as Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling, perform…
Delayed-acceptance is a technique for reducing computational effort for Bayesian models with expensive likelihoods. Using a delayed-acceptance kernel for Markov chain Monte Carlo can reduce the number of expensive likelihoods evaluations…
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 a new computationally efficient sampling scheme for Bayesian inference involving high dimensional probability distributions. Our method maps the original parameter space into a low-dimensional latent space, explores the latent…
This study introduces a computationally efficient algorithm, delayed acceptance Markov chain Monte Carlo (DA-MCMC), designed to improve posterior simulation in quasi-Bayesian inference. Quasi-Bayesian methods, which do not require fully…
A new acceleration algorithm to address the problem of multiple time scales in variational Monte Carlo simulations is presented. After a first attempted move has been rejected, the delayed rejection algorithm attempts a second move with a…
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…
Finding effective ways to exploit parallel computing to accelerate Markov chain Monte Carlo methods is an important problem in Bayesian computation and related disciplines. In this paper, we consider the zeroth-order setting where the…
We develop a novel Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method that exploits a hierarchy of models of increasing complexity to efficiently generate samples from an unnormalized target distribution. Broadly, the method rewrites the Multilevel…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling is an important and commonly used tool for the analysis of hierarchical models. Nevertheless, practitioners generally have two options for MCMC: utilize existing software that generates a black-box…
High-dimensional data are routinely collected in many areas. We are particularly interested in Bayesian classification models in which one or more variables are imbalanced. Current Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms for posterior…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are widely used in machine learning. One of the major problems with MCMC is the question of how to design chains that mix fast over the whole state space; in particular, how to select the parameters…
Sequential optimization methods are often confronted with the curse of dimensionality in high-dimensional spaces. Current approaches under the Gaussian process framework are still burdened by the computational complexity of tracking…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, such as the Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithm, are widely used for Bayesian inference. One of the most important issues for any MCMC method is the convergence of the Markov chain, which depends…
Slice sampling is a well-established Markov chain Monte Carlo method for (approximate) sampling of target distributions which are only known up to a normalizing constant. The method is based on choosing a new state on a slice, i.e., a…