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Gibbs sampling is a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method often used in Bayesian learning. MCMC methods can be difficult to deploy on parallel and distributed systems due to their inherently sequential nature. We study asynchronous Gibbs…
We prove explicit, i.e., non-asymptotic, error bounds for Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods, such as the Metropolis algorithm. The problem is to compute the expectation (or integral) of f with respect to a measure which can be given by a…
Inference after model selection presents computational challenges when dealing with intractable conditional distributions. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a common method for sampling from these distributions, but its slow convergence…
Estimation in the deformable template model is a big challenge in image analysis. The issue is to estimate an atlas of a population. This atlas contains a template and the corresponding geometrical variability of the observed shapes. The…
Markov chain Monte Carlo methods are often deemed too computationally intensive to be of any practical use for big data applications, and in particular for inference on datasets containing a large number $n$ of individual data points, also…
Bounding chains are a technique that offers three benefits to Markov chain practitioners: a theoretical bound on the mixing time of the chain under restricted conditions, experimental bounds on the mixing time of the chain that are provably…
An Automated Sliced Gibbs framework is proposed for fully automated Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling from arbitrary finite dimensional probability kernels. The method targets unnormalized, non-smooth, heavy tailed, and highly multimodal…
We present the first class of perfect sampling (also known as exact simulation) algorithms for the steady-state distribution of non-Markovian loss networks. We use a variation of Dominated Coupling From The Past for which we simulate a…
This paper investigates methods for estimating the optimal stochastic control policy for a Markov Decision Process with unknown transition dynamics and an unknown reward function. This form of model-free reinforcement learning comprises…
In any Markov chain Monte Carlo analysis, rapid convergence of the chain to its target probability distribution is of practical and theoretical importance. A chain that converges at a geometric rate is geometrically ergodic. In this paper,…
Likelihood-free methods, such as approximate Bayesian computation, are powerful tools for practical inference problems with intractable likelihood functions. Markov chain Monte Carlo and sequential Monte Carlo variants of approximate…
Markov chain Monte Carlo is a method of producing a correlated sample in order to estimate features of a target distribution via ergodic averages. A fundamental question is when should sampling stop? That is, when are the ergodic averages…
We propose a very fast approximate Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling framework that is applicable to a large class of sparse Bayesian inference problems, where the computational cost per iteration in several models is of order…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are simple and extremely powerful techniques to sample from almost arbitrary distributions. The flaw in practice is that it can take a large and/or unknown amount of time to converge to the…
High-quality random samples of quantum states are needed for a variety of tasks in quantum information and quantum computation. Searching the high-dimensional quantum state space for a global maximum of an objective function with many local…
We develop a new bidirectional algorithm for estimating Markov chain multi-step transition probabilities: given a Markov chain, we want to estimate the probability of hitting a given target state in $\ell$ steps after starting from a given…
In order to sample from a given target distribution (often of Gibbs type), the Monte Carlo Markov chain method consists in constructing an ergodic Markov process whose invariant measure is the target distribution. By sampling the Markov…
We present a new approach to sample from generic binary distributions, based on an exact Hamiltonian Monte Carlo algorithm applied to a piecewise continuous augmentation of the binary distribution of interest. An extension of this idea to…
We study the convergence properties of a collapsed Gibbs sampler for Bayesian vector autoregressions with predictors, or exogenous variables. The Markov chain generated by our algorithm is shown to be geometrically ergodic regardless of…
Particle Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods are used to carry out inference in non-linear and non-Gaussian state space models, where the posterior density of the states is approximated using particles. Current approaches usually perform…