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We establish epigraphical and uniform laws of large numbers for sample-based approximations of law invariant risk functionals. These sample-based approximation schemes include Monte Carlo (MC) and certain randomized quasi-Monte Carlo…
Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) is an inference algorithm for state space models that approximates the posterior by sampling from a sequence of target distributions. The target distributions are often chosen to be the filtering distributions,…
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…
In Bayesian inverse problems, one aims at characterizing the posterior distribution of a set of unknowns, given indirect measurements. For non-linear/non-Gaussian problems, analytic solutions are seldom available: Sequential Monte Carlo…
This paper addresses the problem of Monte Carlo approximation of posterior probability distributions. In particular, we have considered a recently proposed technique known as population Monte Carlo (PMC), which is based on an iterative…
The Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) sampling algorithm exploits Hamiltonian dynamics to construct efficient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), which has become increasingly popular in machine learning and statistics. Since HMC uses the gradient…
In this paper, we address the challenge of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms within the approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) framework, which often get trapped in local optima due to their inherent local exploration mechanism. We…
Gradient-based Monte Carlo sampling algorithms, like Langevin dynamics and Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, are important methods for Bayesian inference. In large-scale settings, full-gradients are not affordable and thus stochastic gradients…
Monte Carlo sampling techniques have broad applications in machine learning, Bayesian posterior inference, and parameter estimation. Often the target distribution takes the form of a product distribution over a dataset with a large number…
Using Markov chain Monte Carlo to sample from posterior distributions was the key innovation which made Bayesian data analysis practical. Notoriously, however, MCMC is hard to tune, hard to diagnose, and hard to parallelize. This…
We investigate the stability of a Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) method applied to the problem of sampling from a target distribution on $\mathbb{R}^d$ for large $d$. It is well known that using a single importance sampling step one produces…
Standard MCMC methods can scale poorly to big data settings due to the need to evaluate the likelihood at each iteration. There have been a number of approximate MCMC algorithms that use sub-sampling ideas to reduce this computational…
Multidimensional scaling (MDS) is widely used to reconstruct a low-dimensional representation of high-dimensional data while preserving pairwise distances. However, Bayesian MDS approaches based on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) face…
This paper presents a method called sampling-computation-optimization (SCO) to design batch Bayesian optimization. SCO does not construct new high-dimensional acquisition functions but samples from the existing one-site acquisition function…
We analyse the performance of a recursive Monte Carlo method for the Bayesian estimation of the static parameters of a discrete--time state--space Markov model. The algorithm employs two layers of particle filters to approximate the…
Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) is a class of algorithms that approximate high-dimensional expectations of a Markov chain. SMC algorithms typically include a resampling step. There are many possible ways to resample, but the relative…
Monte Carlo (MC) sampling methods are widely applied in Bayesian inference, system simulation and optimization problems. The Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are a well-known class of MC methods which generate a Markov chain with…
Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) is a methodology for sampling approximately from a sequence of probability distributions of increasing dimension and estimating their normalizing constants. We propose here an alternative methodology named…
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…
Estimating failure probabilities of engineering systems is an important problem in many engineering fields. In this work we consider such problems where the failure probability is extremely small (e.g $\leq10^{-10}$). In this case, standard…