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Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are often used for approximate inference inside learning, but their slow mixing can be difficult to diagnose and the approximations can seriously degrade learning. To alleviate these issues, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-02-25 Jacob Steinhardt , Percy Liang

Practitioners of Bayesian statistics have long depended on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) to obtain samples from intractable posterior distributions. Unfortunately, MCMC algorithms are typically serial, and do not scale to the large…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-06-11 Maxim Rabinovich , Elaine Angelino , Michael I. Jordan

In a first part, we prove Bernstein-type deviation inequalities for bifurcating Markov chains (BMC) under a geometric ergodicity assumption, completing former results of Guyon and Bitseki Penda, Djellout and Guillin. These preliminary…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-09-11 S. Valère Bitseki Penda , Marc Hoffmann , Adélaïde Olivier

We consider adaptive increasingly rare Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms, which are adaptive MCMC methods, where the adaptation concerning the "past'' happens less and less frequently over time. Under a contraction assumption with…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-02-24 Julian Hofstadler , Krzysztof Latuszynski , Gareth O. Roberts , Daniel Rudolf

We study the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) estimator for numerical integration for functions that do not need to be square integrable w.r.t. the invariant distribution. For chains with a spectral gap we show that the absolute mean error…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-08-13 Julian Hofstadler

We propose approaches for testing implementations of Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods as well as of general Monte Carlo methods. Based on statistical hypothesis tests, these approaches can be used in a unit testing framework to, for…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-09-21 Axel Gandy , James Scott

We propose quantum algorithms that provide provable speedups for Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods commonly used for sampling from probability distributions of the form $\pi \propto e^{-f}$, where $f$ is a potential function. Our…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-04-07 Guneykan Ozgul , Xiantao Li , Mehrdad Mahdavi , Chunhao Wang

Posterior inference with an intractable likelihood is becoming an increasingly common task in scientific domains which rely on sophisticated computer simulations. Typically, these forward models do not admit tractable densities forcing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-29 Joeri Hermans , Volodimir Begy , Gilles Louppe

We propose a generic Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm to speed up computations for datasets with many observations. A key feature of our approach is the use of the highly efficient difference estimator from the survey sampling…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-08-03 Matias Quiroz , Mattias Villani , Robert Kohn

Elliptical slice sampling is a widely used gradient-free Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm that is tuning-free and capable of adapting to local characteristics of the target distribution. However, its primary limitation is that sampling…

Computation · Statistics 2026-05-22 Nicholas Marco , Surya T. Tokdar

Monte Carlo planners can often return sub-optimal actions, even if they are guaranteed to converge in the limit of infinite samples. Known asymptotic regret bounds do not provide any way to measure confidence of a recommended action at the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-11-04 John Mern , Mykel J. Kochenderfer

Adaptive Markov Chain Monte Carlo (AMCMC) is a class of MCMC algorithms where the proposal distribution changes at every iteration of the chain. In this case it is important to verify that such a Markov Chain indeed has a stationary…

Probability · Mathematics 2015-09-07 Gopal K. Basak , Arunangshu Biswas

Approximate Bayesian computation has emerged as a standard computational tool when dealing with the increasingly common scenario of completely intractable likelihood functions in Bayesian inference. We show that many common Markov chain…

Methodology · Statistics 2014-08-12 Anthony Lee , Krzysztof Latuszynski

A non trivial problem that arises in several applications is the estimation of the mean of a truncated normal distribution. In this paper, an iterative deterministic scheme for approximating this mean is proposed. It has been inspired from…

Large, sparse linear systems are pervasive in modern science and engineering, and Krylov subspace solvers are an established means of solving them. Yet convergence can be slow for ill-conditioned matrices, so practical deployments usually…

In this paper, we explore a general Aggregated Gradient Langevin Dynamics framework (AGLD) for the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling. We investigate the nonasymptotic convergence of AGLD with a unified analysis for different data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-22 Chao Zhang , Jiahao Xie , Zebang Shen , Peilin Zhao , Tengfei Zhou , Hui Qian

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…

Estimation in the deformable template model is a big challenge in image analysis. The issue is to estimate an atlas of a population. This atlas contains a template and the corresponding geometrical variability of the observed shapes. The…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2013-09-09 Stéphanie Allassonniere , Estelle Kuhn

Effective sample size is a standard summary of Markov chain Monte Carlo output, but it is usually attached to scalar or Euclidean summaries chosen by the analyst. For manifold-valued samples this choice is not canonical: coordinate-wise…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-06 Kisung You

We explore whether splitting and killing methods can improve the accuracy of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) estimates of rare event probabilities, and we make three contributions. First, we prove that "weighted ensemble" is the only…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2020-12-17 Robert J. Webber , David Aristoff , Gideon Simpson