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Recently there have been exciting developments in Monte Carlo methods, with the development of new MCMC and sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithms which are based on continuous-time, rather than discrete-time, Markov processes. This has…

Computation · Statistics 2020-09-29 Paul Fearnhead , Joris Bierkens , Murray Pollock , Gareth O Roberts

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are routinely used to draw samples from distributions with intractable normalization constants. However, standard MCMC algorithms do not apply to doubly-intractable distributions in which there are…

Computation · Statistics 2012-07-02 Iain Murray , Zoubin Ghahramani , David MacKay

In Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling considerable thought goes into constructing random transitions. But those transitions are almost always driven by a simulated IID sequence. Recently it has been shown that replacing an IID…

Computation · Statistics 2008-07-31 Seth D. Tribble , Art B. Owen

Exact approximations of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are a general emerging class of sampling algorithms. One of the main ideas behind exact approximations consists of replacing intractable quantities required to run standard…

Computation · Statistics 2015-10-30 Christophe Andrieu , Matti Vihola

The Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm is a widely recognised as an efficient method for sampling a specified posterior distribution. However, when the posterior is multi-modal, conventional MCMC algorithms either tend to become…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2014-08-19 Yi-Ming Hu , Martin Hendry , Ik Siong Heng

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have become a cornerstone of many modern scientific analyses by providing a straightforward approach to numerically estimate uncertainties in the parameters of a model using a sequence of random…

Other Statistics · Statistics 2020-03-10 Joshua S. Speagle

We propose approaches for testing implementations of Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods as well as of general Monte Carlo methods. Based on statistical hypothesis tests, these approaches can be used in a unit testing framework to, for…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-09-21 Axel Gandy , James Scott

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are indispensable when sampling from a complex, high-dimensional distribution by a conventional method is intractable. Even though MCMC is a powerful tool, it is also hard to control and tune in…

Graphics · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Sascha Holl , Gurprit Singh , Hans-Peter Seidel

Markov chain Monte Carlo is an inherently serial algorithm. Although likelihood calculations for individual steps can sometimes be parallelized, the serial evolution of the process is widely viewed as incompatible with parallelization,…

Computation · Statistics 2013-12-31 Douglas N. VanDerwerken , Scott C. Schmidler

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a simulation method commonly used for estimating expectations with respect to a given distribution. We consider estimating the covariance matrix of the asymptotic multivariate normal distribution of a…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-06-06 Ning Dai , Galin L. Jones

Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms are used to simulate from complex statistical distributions by way of a local exploration of these distributions. This local feature avoids heavy requests on understanding the nature of the target, but it…

Computation · Statistics 2018-04-12 Christian P. Robert , Victor Elvira , Nick Tawn , Changye Wu

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are foundational algorithms for Bayesian inference and probabilistic modeling. However, most MCMC algorithms are inherently sequential and their time complexity scales linearly with the sequence…

Computation · Statistics 2025-12-03 David M. Zoltowski , Skyler Wu , Xavier Gonzalez , Leo Kozachkov , Scott W. Linderman

We consider the problem of estimating the measure of subsets in very large networks. A prime tool for this purpose is the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm. This algorithm, while extremely useful in many cases, still often suffers…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-09-01 Ahmad Askarian , Rupei Xu , András Faragó

In Bayesian inference, predictive distributions are typically in the form of samples generated via Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) or related algorithms. In this paper, we conduct a systematic analysis of how to make and evaluate…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-06-25 Fabian Krüger , Sebastian Lerch , Thordis L. Thorarinsdottir , Tilmann Gneiting

We introduce a general Monte Carlo method based on Nested Sampling (NS), for sampling complex probability distributions and estimating the normalising constant. The method uses one or more particles, which explore a mixture of nested…

Computation · Statistics 2012-02-27 Brendon J. Brewer , Livia B. Pártay , Gábor Csányi

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods such as Gibbs sampling are finding widespread use in applied statistics and machine learning. These often lead to difficult computational problems, which are increasingly being solved on parallel and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-06-05 Alexander Terenin , Eric P. Xing

In this article we consider computing expectations w.r.t.~probability laws associated to a certain class of stochastic systems. In order to achieve such a task, one must not only resort to numerical approximation of the expectation, but…

Computation · Statistics 2017-10-30 Ajay Jasra , Kengo Kamatani , Kody Law , Yan Zhou

This paper presents how to use common random number (CRN) simulation to evaluate Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) convergence to stationarity. We provide an upper bound on the Wasserstein distance of a Markov chain to its stationary…

Computation · Statistics 2025-11-03 Sabrina Sixta , Jeffrey S. Rosenthal , Austin Brown

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are often used in clustering since they guarantee asymptotically exact expectations in the infinite-time limit. In finite time, though, slow mixing often leads to poor performance. Modern computing…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-02-24 Tin D. Nguyen , Brian L. Trippe , Tamara Broderick

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-11-13 Xianghang Liu , Justin Domke