Related papers: Consistency of Markov chain quasi-Monte Carlo on c…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…