Related papers: Exact sampling for intractable probability distrib…
It is common practice in Markov chain Monte Carlo to update the simulation one variable (or sub-block of variables) at a time, rather than conduct a single full-dimensional update. When it is possible to draw from each full-conditional…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods sample from unnormalized probability distributions and offer guarantees of exact sampling. However, in the continuous case, unfavorable geometry of the target distribution can greatly limit the…
Statistical signal processing applications usually require the estimation of some parameters of interest given a set of observed data. These estimates are typically obtained either by solving a multi-variate optimization problem, as in the…
Markov jump processes (MJPs) are continuous-time stochastic processes widely used in a variety of applied disciplines. Inference for MJPs typically proceeds via Markov chain Monte Carlo, the state-of-the-art being a uniformization-based…
Let P be a set of points in R^d, and let M be a function that maps any subset of P to a positive real number. We examine the problem of computing the exact mean and variance of M when a subset of points in P is selected according to a…
This paper surveys various results about Markov chains on general (non-countable) state spaces. It begins with an introduction to Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms, which provide the motivation and context for the theory which…
Finding effective ways to exploit parallel computing to accelerate Markov chain Monte Carlo methods is an important problem in Bayesian computation and related disciplines. In this paper, we consider the zeroth-order setting where the…
Markov chain Monte Carlo methods such as Gibbs sampling and simple forms of the Metropolis algorithm typically move about the distribution being sampled via a random walk. For the complex, high-dimensional distributions commonly encountered…
The resolution of many large-scale inverse problems using MCMC methods requires a step of drawing samples from a high dimensional Gaussian distribution. While direct Gaussian sampling techniques, such as those based on Cholesky…
The present paper focuses on the problem of sampling from a given target distribution $\pi$ defined on some general state space. To this end, we introduce a novel class of non-reversible Markov chains, each chain being defined on an…
Direct simulation of biomolecular dynamics in thermal equilibrium is challenging due to the metastable nature of conformation dynamics and the computational cost of molecular dynamics. Biased or enhanced sampling methods may improve the…
In this paper we propose a perfect simulation algorithm for the Exponential Random Graph Model, based on the Coupling From The Past method of Propp & Wilson (1996). We use a Glauber dynamics to construct the Markov Chain and we prove the…
Efficient sampling from a classical Gibbs distribution is an important computational problem with applications ranging from statistical physics over Monte Carlo and optimization algorithms to machine learning. We introduce a family of…
While one-dimensional Markov processes are well understood, going to higher dimensions there are only a few analytically solved Ising-like models, in practice requiring to use relatively costly, uncontrollable and inaccurate Monte-Carlo…
Bayesian inference via standard Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods is too computationally intensive to handle large datasets, since the cost per step usually scales like $\Theta(n)$ in the number of data points $n$. We propose the…
Sampling from multimodal distributions is a challenging task in scientific computing. When a distribution has an exact symmetry between the modes, direct jumps among them can accelerate the samplings significantly. However, the…
Global fits of physics models require efficient methods for exploring high-dimensional and/or multimodal posterior functions. We introduce a novel method for accelerating Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling by pairing a…
We can directly sample from the conditional distribution of any log-affine model. The algorithm is a Markov chain on a bounded integer lattice, and its transition probability is the ratio of the UMVUE (uniformly minimum variance unbiased…
Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) or likelihood-free inference algorithms are used to find approximations to posterior distributions without making explicit use of the likelihood function, depending instead on simulation of sample data…
It is a common contention that it is an ``impossible mission'' to exactly determine the minimum sample size for the estimation of a binomial parameter with prescribed margin of error and confidence level. In this paper, we investigate such…