Related papers: Zero Variance Markov Chain Monte Carlo for Bayesia…

A simple and stable method for computing accurate expectation values of observable with Variational Monte Carlo (VMC) or Diffusion Monte Carlo (DMC) algorithms is presented. The basic idea consists in replacing the usual ``bare'' estimator…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are generally regarded as the gold standard technique for Bayesian inference. They are theoretically well-understood and conceptually simple to apply in practice. The drawback of MCMC is that in…

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…

The batch means estimator of the MCMC variance is a simple and effective measure of accuracy for MCMC based ergodic averages. Under various regularity conditions, the estimator has been shown to be consistent for the true variance. However,…

The naive importance sampling estimator, based on samples from a single importance density, can be numerically unstable. Instead, we consider generalized importance sampling estimators where samples from more than one probability…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) produces a correlated sample for estimating expectations with respect to a target distribution. A fundamental question is when should sampling stop so that we have good estimates of the desired quantities?…

Stochastic gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (SGMCMC) is considered the gold standard for Bayesian inference in large-scale models, such as Bayesian neural networks. Since practitioners face speed versus accuracy tradeoffs in these models,…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is one of the most useful approaches to scientific computing because of its flexible construction, ease of use and generality. Indeed, MCMC is indispensable for performing Bayesian analysis. Two critical…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a sampling-based method for estimating features of probability distributions. MCMC methods produce a serially correlated, yet representative, sample from the desired distribution. As such it can be…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are employed to sample from a given distribution of interest, whenever either the distribution does not exist in closed form, or, if it does, no efficient method to simulate an independent sample from…

This document presents methods to remove the initialization or burn-in bias from Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) estimates, with consequences on parallel computing, convergence diagnostics and performance assessment. The document is written…

We present a general approach to greatly increase at little cost the efficiency of Monte Carlo algorithms. To each observable to be computed we associate a renormalized observable (improved estimator) having the same average but a different…

Monte Carlo experiments produce samples in order to estimate features of a given distribution. However, simultaneous estimation of means and quantiles has received little attention, despite being common practice. In this setting we…

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)…

Markov chain (MC) algorithms are ubiquitous in machine learning and statistics and many other disciplines. Typically, these algorithms can be formulated as acceptance rejection methods. In this work we present a novel estimator applicable…

Monte Carlo methods -- such as Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and piecewise deterministic Markov process (PDMP) samplers -- provide asymptotically exact estimators of expectations under a target distribution. There is growing interest in…

Adaptive and interacting Markov Chains Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are a novel class of non-Markovian algorithms aimed at improving the simulation efficiency for complicated target distributions. In this paper, we study a general…

Posterior distributions often feature intractable normalizing constants, called marginal likelihoods or evidence, that are useful for model comparison via Bayes factors. This has motivated a number of methods for estimating ratios of…

A key quantity of interest in Bayesian inference are expectations of functions with respect to a posterior distribution. Markov Chain Monte Carlo is a fundamental tool to consistently compute these expectations via averaging samples drawn…

We propose Subsampling MCMC, a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) framework where the likelihood function for $n$ observations is estimated from a random subset of $m$ observations. We introduce a highly efficient unbiased estimator of the…