Related papers: Conditions for rapid mixing of parallel and simula…
Simulated and parallel tempering are families of Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms where a temperature parameter is varied during the simulation to overcome bottlenecks to convergence due to multimodality. In this work we introduce and…
Simulated tempering is a widely used strategy for sampling from multimodal distributions. In this paper, we consider simulated tempering combined with an arbitrary local Markov chain Monte Carlo sampler and present a new decomposition…
The study of animal behavioural states inferred through hidden Markov models and similar state switching models has seen a significant increase in popularity in recent years. The ability to account for varying levels of behavioural scale…
In the field of sampling algorithms, MCMC (Markov Chain Monte Carlo) methods are widely used when direct sampling is not possible. However, multimodality of target distributions often leads to slow convergence and mixing. One common…
Parallel tempering is a generic Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling method which allows good mixing with multimodal target distributions, where conventional Metropolis-Hastings algorithms often fail. The mixing properties of the sampler…
We study the spectral gaps of parallel and simulated tempering chains targeting multimodal Gibbs measures. In particular, we consider chains constructed from Metropolis random walks that preserve the Gibbs distributions at a sequence of…
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…
In this paper we develop a new general Bayesian methodology that simultaneously estimates parameters of interest and the marginal likelihood of the model. The proposed methodology builds on Simulated Tempering, which is a powerful algorithm…
Parallel tempering is a meta-algorithm for Markov Chain Monte Carlo that uses multiple chains to sample from tempered versions of the target distribution, enhancing mixing in multi-modal distributions that are challenging for traditional…
In a series of recent works, Boyd, Diaconis, and their co-authors have introduced a semidefinite programming approach for computing the fastest mixing Markov chain on a graph of allowed transitions, given a target stationary distribution.…
Parallel tempering (PT) methods are a popular class of Markov chain Monte Carlo schemes used to sample complex high-dimensional probability distributions. They rely on a collection of $N$ interacting auxiliary chains targeting tempered…
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…
Simulations of systems with quenched disorder are extremely demanding, suffering from the combined effect of slow relaxation and the need of performing the disorder average. As a consequence, new algorithms, improved implementations, and…
Parallel tempering (PT) is a class of Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms that constructs a path of distributions annealing between a tractable reference and an intractable target, and then interchanges states along the path to improve…
We study metastability and mixing time for a non-reversible probabilistic cellular automaton. With a suitable choice of the parameters, we first show that the stationary distribution is close in total variation to a low temperature Ising…
Over the past decades, linear mixed models have attracted considerable attention in various fields of applied statistics. They are popular whenever clustered, hierarchical or longitudinal data are investigated. Nonetheless, statistical…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods are algorithms used to sample probability distributions, commonly used to sample the Boltzmann distribution of physical/chemical models (e.g., protein folding, Ising model, etc.). This allows us to study…
Multimodal structures in the sampling density (e.g. two competing phases) can be a serious problem for traditional Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), because correct sampling of the different structures can only be guaranteed for infinite…
Finite mixture and Markov-switching models generalize and, therefore, nest specifications featuring only one component. While specifying priors in the two: the general (mixture) model and its special (single-component) case, it may be…
The preparation of the stationary distribution of irreducible, time-reversible Markov chains is a fundamental building block in many heuristic approaches to algorithmically hard problems. It has been conjectured that quantum analogs of…