Related papers: On Stochastic Error and Computational Efficiency o…
Monte Carlo (MC) sampling algorithms are an extremely widely-used technique to estimate expectations of functions f(x), especially in high dimensions. Control variates are a very powerful technique to reduce the error of such estimates, but…
Quantum mechanics for many-body systems may be reduced to the evaluation of integrals in 3N dimensions using Monte-Carlo, providing the Quantum Monte Carlo ab initio methods. Here we limit ourselves to expectation values for trial…
Monte Carlo algorithms simulate some prescribed number of samples, taking some random real time to complete the computations necessary. This work considers the converse: to impose a real-time budget on the computation, which results in the…
Use each of n exact samples as the initial state for a MCMC sampler run for m steps. We give confidence intervals for accuracy of estimators which are always valid and which, in certain settings, are almost as good as the intervals one…
We present a novel Ensemble Monte Carlo Growth method to sample the equilibrium thermodynamic properties of random chains. The method is based on the multicanonical technique of computing the density of states in the energy space. Such a…
To sample from a given target distribution, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling relies on constructing an ergodic Markov chain with the target distribution as its invariant measure. For any MCMC method, an important question is how to…
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…
This paper addresses the key challenge of estimating the asymptotic covariance associated with the Markov chain central limit theorem, which is essential for visualizing and terminating Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulations. We focus…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling is computationally expensive, especially for complex models. Alternative methods make simplifying assumptions about the posterior to reduce computational burden, but their impact on predictive…
We design and implement a novel algorithm for computing a multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) estimator of the cumulative distribution function of a quantity of interest in problems with random input parameters or initial conditions. Our approach…
We propose Subsampling MCMC, a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) framework where the likelihood function for $n$ observations is estimated from a random subset of $m$ observations. We introduce a highly efficient unbiased estimator of the…
We describe and analyze some Monte Carlo methods for manifolds in Euclidean space defined by equality and inequality constraints. First, we give an MCMC sampler for probability distributions defined by un-normalized densities on such…
We demonstrate the use of a variational method to determine a quantitative lower bound on the rate of convergence of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms as a function of the target density and proposal density. The bound relies on…
We explore whether splitting and killing methods can improve the accuracy of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) estimates of rare event probabilities, and we make three contributions. First, we prove that "weighted ensemble" is the only…
Monte Carlo (MC) sampling methods are widely applied in Bayesian inference, system simulation and optimization problems. The Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are a well-known class of MC methods which generate a Markov chain with…
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…
This article considers the sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) approximation of ratios of normalizing constants associated to posterior distributions which in principle rely on continuum models. Therefore, the Monte Carlo estimation error and the…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are widely used in machine learning. One of the major problems with MCMC is the question of how to design chains that mix fast over the whole state space; in particular, how to select the parameters…
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…
Conventional Monte Carlo simulations are stochastic in the sense that the acceptance of a trial move is decided by comparing a computed acceptance probability with a random number, uniformly distributed between 0 and 1. Here we consider the…