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In engineering examples, one often encounters the need to sample from unnormalized distributions with complex shapes that may also be implicitly defined through a physical or numerical simulation model, making it computationally expensive…
We introduce Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms based on numerical approximations of piecewise-deterministic Markov processes obtained with the framework of splitting schemes. We present unadjusted as well as adjusted algorithms,…
Optimal scaling has been well studied for Metropolis-Hastings (M-H) algorithms in continuous spaces, but a similar understanding has been lacking in discrete spaces. Recently, a family of locally balanced proposals (LBP) for discrete spaces…
Accurately analyzing graph properties of social networks is a challenging task because of access limitations to the graph data. To address this challenge, several algorithms to obtain unbiased estimates of properties from few samples via a…
We show that for any multiple-try Metropolis algorithm, one can always accept the proposal and evaluate the importance weight that is needed to correct for the bias without extra computational cost. This results in a general, convenient,…
Parallel tempering is a generic Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling method which allows good mixing with multimodal target distributions, where conventional Metropolis-Hastings algorithms often fail. The mixing properties of the sampler…
The pseudo-marginal algorithm is a variant of the Metropolis--Hastings algorithm which samples asymptotically from a probability distribution when it is only possible to estimate unbiasedly an unnormalized version of its density.…
Stochastic gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms are popular samplers for approximate inference, but they are generally biased. We show that many recent versions of these methods (e.g. Chen et al. (2014)) cannot be corrected using…
There is a tension between robustness and efficiency when designing Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling algorithms. Here we focus on robustness with respect to tuning parameters, showing that more sophisticated algorithms tend to be…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are powerful computational tools for analysis of complex statistical problems. However, their computational efficiency is highly dependent on the chosen proposal distribution, which is generally…
We consider the Random Walk Metropolis algorithm on $\mathbb{R}^n$ with Gaussian proposals, and when the target probability measure is the $n$-fold product of a one-dimensional law. It is well known (see Roberts et al. (Ann. Appl. Probab. 7…
Stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (SGMCMC) is a popular class of algorithms for scalable Bayesian inference. However, these algorithms include hyperparameters such as step size or batch size that influence the accuracy of…
Many random processes can be simulated as the output of a deterministic model accepting random inputs. Such a model usually describes a complex mathematical or physical stochastic system and the randomness is introduced in the input…
We propose a new class of learning algorithms that combines variational approximation and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation. Naive algorithms that use the variational approximation as proposal distribution can perform poorly…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling is an important and commonly used tool for the analysis of hierarchical models. Nevertheless, practitioners generally have two options for MCMC: utilize existing software that generates a black-box…
The choice of the increment distribution is crucial for the random-walk Metropolis-Hastings (RWM) algorithm. In this paper we study the optimal choice in high-dimension setting among all possible increment distributions. The conclusion is…
We study self-avoiding walks on the four-dimensional hypercubic lattice via Monte Carlo simulations of walks with up to one billion steps. We study the expected logarithmic corrections to scaling, and find convincing evidence in support the…
It has become increasingly easy nowadays to collect approximate posterior samples via fast algorithms such as variational Bayes, but concerns exist about the estimation accuracy. It is tempting to build solutions that exploit approximate…
Applying standard Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms to large data sets is computationally expensive. Both the calculation of the acceptance probability and the creation of informed proposals usually require an iteration through the…
Hamiltonian Monte-Carlo (HMC) and its auto-tuned variant, the No U-Turn Sampler (NUTS) can struggle to accurately sample distributions with complex geometries, e.g., varying curvature, due to their constant step size for leapfrog…