Related papers: Control Variates for Reversible MCMC Samplers

In statistical analysis, Monte Carlo (MC) stands as a classical numerical integration method. When encountering challenging sample problem, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a commonly employed method. However, the MCMC estimator is biased…

This paper is devoted to the multivariate estimation of a vector of Poisson means. A novel loss function that penalises bad estimates of each of the parameters and the sum (or equivalently the mean) of the parameters is introduced. Under…

Bayesian inference for doubly-intractable pairwise exponential graphical models typically involves variations of the exchange algorithm or approximate Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) samplers. However, existing methods for both classes of…

The MC$^3$ (Madigan and York, 1995) and Gibbs (George and McCulloch, 1997) samplers are the most widely implemented algorithms for Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) in linear regression models. These samplers draw a variable at random in each…

This note presents a simple and elegant sampler which could be used as an alternative to the reversible jump MCMC methodology.

Building upon recent developments of force-based estimators with a reduced variance for the computation of densities, radial distribution functions or local transport properties from molecular simulations, we show that the variance can be…

Interest is in evaluating, by Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation, the expected value of a function with respect to a, possibly unnormalized, probability distribution. A general purpose variance reduction technique for the MCMC…

We consider the problem of estimating confidence intervals for the mean of a random variable, where the goal is to produce the smallest possible interval for a given number of samples. While minimax optimal algorithms are known for this…

In this paper we propose a novel variance reduction approach for additive functionals of Markov chains based on minimization of an estimate for the asymptotic variance of these functionals over suitable classes of control variates. A…

We study general coordinate-wise MCMC schemes (such as Metropolis-within-Gibbs samplers), which are commonly used to fit Bayesian non-conjugate hierarchical models. We relate their convergence properties to the ones of the corresponding…

Repulsive mixture models have recently gained popularity for Bayesian cluster detection. Compared to more traditional mixture models, repulsive mixture models produce a smaller number of well separated clusters. The most commonly used…

We introduce a new Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampler called the Markov Interacting Importance Sampler (MIIS). The MIIS sampler uses conditional importance sampling (IS) approximations to jointly sample the current state of the Markov…

Assume that we would like to estimate the expected value of a function $F$ with respect to an intractable density $\pi$, which is specified up to some unknown normalising constant. We prove that if $\pi$ is close enough under KL divergence…

In this paper we examine a control variate estimator for a quantity that can be expressed as the expectation of a functional of a random process, that is itself the solution of a differential equation driven by fast mean-reverting ergodic…

This paper outlines a Bayesian approach to estimate finite mixtures of Tobit models. The method consists of an MCMC approach that combines Gibbs sampling with data augmentation and is simple to implement. I show through simulations that the…

Flexible variational distributions improve variational inference but are harder to optimize. In this work we present a control variate that is applicable for any reparameterizable distribution with known mean and covariance matrix, e.g.…

The recent growth in multi-fidelity uncertainty quantification has given rise to a large set of variance reduction techniques that leverage information from model ensembles to provide variance reduction for estimates of the statistics of a…

In multiple importance sampling we combine samples from a finite list of proposal distributions. When those proposal distributions are used to create control variates, it is possible (Owen and Zhou, 2000) to bound the ratio of the resulting…

The Multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) method has been applied successfully in a wide range of settings since its first introduction by Giles (2008). When using only two levels, the method can be viewed as a kind of control-variate approach to…

Monte Carlo (MC) sampling algorithms are an extremely widely-used technique to estimate expectations of functions f(x), especially in high dimensions. Control variates are a very powerful technique to reduce the error of such estimates, but…