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The Markov chain Monte Carlo method is a versatile tool in statistical physics to evaluate multi-dimensional integrals numerically. For the method to work effectively, we must consider the following key issues: the choice of ensemble, the…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2014-01-07 Synge Todo , Hidemaro Suwa

We develop a novel Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method that exploits a hierarchy of models of increasing complexity to efficiently generate samples from an unnormalized target distribution. Broadly, the method rewrites the Multilevel…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-09-05 Mikkel B. Lykkegaard , Tim J. Dodwell , Colin Fox , Grigorios Mingas , Robert Scheichl

We propose a Monte Carlo sampler from the reverse diffusion process. Unlike the practice of diffusion models, where the intermediary updates -- the score functions -- are learned with a neural network, we transform the score matching…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-14 Xunpeng Huang , Hanze Dong , Yifan Hao , Yi-An Ma , Tong Zhang

We propose a multilevel Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method for the Bayesian inference of random field parameters in PDEs using high-resolution data. Compared to existing multilevel MCMC methods, we additionally consider level-dependent…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-08-19 Pieter Vanmechelen , Geert Lombaert , Giovanni Samaey

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques are now widely used for cosmological parameter estimation. Chains are generated to sample the posterior probability distribution obtained following the Bayesian approach. An important issue is how…

The goal of this paper is to analyze distributional Markov Decision Processes as a class of control problems in which the objective is to learn policies that steer the distribution of a cumulative reward toward a prescribed target law,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-09 Nicole Bäuerle , Athanasios Vasileiadis

Bayesian analysis for Markov jump processes is a non-trivial and challenging problem. Although exact inference is theoretically possible, it is computationally demanding thus its applicability is limited to a small class of problems. In…

Computation · Statistics 2017-02-08 Vassilios Stathopoulos , Mark A. Girolami

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,…

Probability · Mathematics 2025-11-04 Andrea Bertazzi , Paul Dobson , Pierre Monmarché

Performing numerical integration when the integrand itself cannot be evaluated point-wise is a challenging task that arises in statistical analysis, notably in Bayesian inference for models with intractable likelihood functions. Markov…

Computation · Statistics 2020-06-17 Lawrence Middleton , George Deligiannidis , Arnaud Doucet , Pierre E. Jacob

Monte Carlo methods -- such as Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and piecewise deterministic Markov process (PDMP) samplers -- provide asymptotically exact estimators of expectations under a target distribution. There is growing interest in…

Computation · Statistics 2024-09-09 Adrien Corenflos , Matthew Sutton , Nicolas Chopin

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are algorithms for sampling probability distributions, commonly applied to the Boltzmann distribution in physical and chemical models such as protein folding and the Ising model. These methods enable…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-12-04 Aingeru Ramos , Jose A. Pascual , Javier Navaridas , Ivan Coluzza

We propose a novel Markov chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC) method for reverse engineering the topological structure of stochastic reaction networks, a notoriously challenging problem that is relevant in many modern areas of research, like…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-10-08 Daniel F. Linder , Grzegorz A. Rempala

We consider the inverse reinforcement learning problem, that is, the problem of learning from, and then predicting or mimicking a controller based on state/action data. We propose a statistical model for such data, derived from the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2012-11-27 Sumeetpal S. Singh , Nicolas Chopin , Nick Whiteley

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are widely used to sample from complicated distributions, especially to sample from the posterior distribution in Bayesian inference. However, MCMC is not directly applicable when facing the doubly…

Computation · Statistics 2019-03-29 Guanyang Wang

This work presents an efficient approach for accelerating multilevel Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling for large-scale problems using low-fidelity machine learning models. While conventional techniques for large-scale Bayesian…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-21 Sohail Reddy , Hillary Fairbanks

Statistical inference methods are fundamentally important in machine learning. Most state-of-the-art inference algorithms are variants of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) or variational inference (VI). However, both methods struggle with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-17 Yichuan Zhang , José Miguel Hernández-Lobato

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

Tasks such as record linkage and multi-target tracking, which involve reconstructing the set of objects that underlie some observed data, are particularly challenging for probabilistic inference. Recent work has achieved efficient and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-07-02 Brian Milch , Stuart Russell

We study Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods operating in primary sample space and their interactions with multiple sampling techniques. We observe that incorporating the sampling technique into the state of the Markov Chain, as done in…

Graphics · Computer Science 2017-04-25 Benedikt Bitterli , Wenzel Jakob , Jan Novák , Wojciech Jarosz

An irreversible Markov-chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm with skew detailed balance conditions originally proposed by Turitsyn et al. is extended to general discrete systems on the basis of the Metropolis-Hastings scheme. To evaluate the…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2016-04-21 Yuji Sakai , Koji Hukushima