Related papers: Asymptotic optimality of the cross-entropy method …
We consider selecting the top-$m$ alternatives from a finite number of alternatives via Monte Carlo simulation. Under a Bayesian framework, we formulate the sampling decision as a stochastic dynamic programming problem, and develop a…
A parameter estimation problem is considered, in which dispersed sensors transmit to the statistician partial information regarding their observations. The sensors observe the paths of continuous semimartingales, whose drifts are linear…
Hidden Markov chains are widely applied statistical models of stochastic processes, from fundamental physics and chemistry to finance, health, and artificial intelligence. The hidden Markov processes they generate are notoriously…
We propose a novel Markov chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC) method for reverse engineering the topological structure of stochastic reaction networks, a notoriously challenging problem that is relevant in many modern areas of research, like…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are used to estimate features of interest of a distribution. The Monte Carlo error in estimation has an asymptotic normal distribution whose multivariate nature has so far been ignored in the MCMC…
In solving simulation-based stochastic root-finding or optimization problems that involve rare events, such as in extreme quantile estimation, running crude Monte Carlo can be prohibitively inefficient. To address this issue, importance…
Estimating entropy production from real observation data can be difficult due to finite resolution in both space and time and finite measurement statistics. We characterize the statistical error introduced by finite sample size and compare…
We consider estimating the transition probability matrix of a finite-state finite-observation alphabet hidden Markov model with known observation probabilities. The main contribution is a two-step algorithm; a method of moments estimator…
We introduce the Lyapunov approach to optimal control problems of average risk-sensitive Markov control processes with general risk maps. Motivated by applications in particular to behavioral economics, we consider possibly non-convex risk…
A constructive proof is given to the fact that any ergodic Markov chain can be realized as a random walk subject to a synchronizing road coloring. Redundancy (ratio of extra entropy) in such a realization is also studied.
This note describes sufficient conditions under which total-cost and average-cost Markov decision processes (MDPs) with general state and action spaces, and with weakly continuous transition probabilities, can be reduced to discounted MDPs.…
We describe an exact test of the null hypothesis that a Markov chain is nth order versus the alternate hypothesis that it is $(n+1)$-th order. The procedure does not rely on asymptotic properties, but instead builds up the test statistic…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) requires to evaluate the full data likelihood at different parameter values iteratively and is often computationally infeasible for large data sets. In this paper, we propose to approximate the log-likelihood…
This paper aims at improving the convergence to equilibrium of finite ergodic Markov chains via permutations and projections. First, we prove that a specific mixture of permuted Markov chains arises naturally as a projection under the KL…
The Improved Cross-Entropy (ICE) method is a powerful tool for estimating failure probabilities in reliability analysis. Its core idea is to approximate the optimal importance-sampling density by minimizing the forward Kullback-Leibler…
We present a new way of converting a reversible finite Markov chain into a non-reversible one, with a theoretical guarantee that the asymptotic variance of the MCMC estimator based on the non-reversible chain is reduced. The method is…
This paper presents a general asymptotic theory of sequential Bayesian estimation giving results for the strongest, almost sure convergence. We show that under certain smoothness conditions on the probability model, the greedy information…
The efficient calculation of rare-event kinetics in complex dynamical systems, such as the rate and pathways of ligand dissociation from a protein, is a generally unsolved problem. Markov state models can systematically integrate ensembles…
Parameter estimation in Markov random fields (MRFs) is a difficult task, in which inference over the network is run in the inner loop of a gradient descent procedure. Replacing exact inference with approximate methods such as loopy belief…
An aperiodic and irreducible Markov chain on a finite state space converges to its stationary distribution. When convergence to equilibrium is measured by total variation distance, there exists an optimal coupling and a maximal coupling…