Related papers: The Computational Complexity of Estimating Converg…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is the engine of modern Bayesian statistics, being used to approximate the posterior and derived quantities of interest. Despite this, the issue of how the output from a Markov chain is post-processed and…
We address the problem of estimating the mixing time of a Markov chain from a single trajectory of observations. Unlike most previous works which employed Hilbert space methods to estimate spectral gaps, we opt for an approach based on…
The problem of efficiently sampling from a set of (undirected, or directed) graphs with a given degree sequence has many applications. One approach to this problem uses a simple Markov chain, which we call the switch chain, to perform the…
We develop a theory of weak Poincar\'e inequalities to characterize convergence rates of ergodic Markov chains. Motivated by the application of Markov chains in the context of algorithms, we develop a relevant set of tools which enable the…
The use of heuristics to assess the convergence and compress the output of Markov chain Monte Carlo can be sub-optimal in terms of the empirical approximations that are produced. Typically a number of the initial states are attributed to…
Restricted Boltzmann Machines are simple and powerful generative models that can encode any complex dataset. Despite all their advantages, in practice the trainings are often unstable and it is difficult to assess their quality because the…
This article provides the first procedure for computing a fully data-dependent interval that traps the mixing time $t_{\text{mix}}$ of a finite reversible ergodic Markov chain at a prescribed confidence level. The interval is computed from…
Markov chain analysis is a key technique in formal verification. A practical obstacle is that all probabilities in Markov models need to be known. However, system quantities such as failure rates or packet loss ratios, etc. are often not --…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulations are modeled as driven by true random numbers. We consider variance bounding Markov chains driven by a deterministic sequence of numbers. The star-discrepancy provides a measure of efficiency of…
We study the computational complexity of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods for high-dimensional Bayesian linear regression under sparsity constraints. We first show that a Bayesian approach can achieve variable-selection consistency…
Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms are invaluable tools for exploring stationary properties of physical systems, especially in situations where direct sampling is unfeasible. Common implementations of Monte Carlo algorithms employ…
In this paper, we study the mixing time of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) for integer least-square (LS) optimization problems. It is found that the mixing time of MCMC for integer LS problems depends on the structure of the underlying…
Markov chains can be used to generate samples whose distribution approximates a given target distribution. The quality of the samples of such Markov chains can be measured by the discrepancy between the empirical distribution of the samples…
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…
Let $X_n, n \ge 0$ be a Markov chain with finite state space $M$. If $x,y \in M$ such that $x$ is transient we have $P^y(X_n = x) \to 0$ for $n \to \infty$, and under mild aperiodicity conditions this convergence is monotone in that for…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods such as Gibbs sampling are finding widespread use in applied statistics and machine learning. These often lead to difficult computational problems, which are increasingly being solved on parallel and…
The spectral gap $\gamma$ of a finite, ergodic, and reversible Markov chain is an important parameter measuring the asymptotic rate of convergence. In applications, the transition matrix $P$ may be unknown, yet one sample of the chain up to…
If the state space of a homogeneous continuous-time Markov chain is too large, making inferences - here limited to determining marginal or limit expectations - becomes computationally infeasible. Fortunately, the state space of such a chain…
Bayesian analysis often concerns an evaluation of models with different dimensionality as is necessary in, for example, model selection or mixture models. To facilitate this evaluation, transdimensional Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)…
The availability of data sets with large numbers of variables is rapidly increasing. The effective application of Bayesian variable selection methods for regression with these data sets has proved difficult since available Markov chain…