Related papers: Small World MCMC with Tempering: Ergodicity and Sp…

In this paper we consider the problem of sampling from the low-temperature exponential random graph model (ERGM). The usual approach is via Markov chain Monte Carlo, but Bhamidi et al. showed that any local Markov chain suffers from an…

We compare convergence rates of Metropolis--Hastings chains to multi-modal target distributions when the proposal distributions can be of ``local'' and ``small world'' type. In particular, we show that by adding occasional long-range jumps…

High-dimensional distributions, especially those with heavy tails, are notoriously difficult for off-the-shelf MCMC samplers: the combination of unbounded state spaces, diminishing gradient information, and local moves results in…

Simulated tempering is a widely used strategy for sampling from multimodal distributions. In this paper, we consider simulated tempering combined with an arbitrary local Markov chain Monte Carlo sampler and present a new decomposition…

Modern problems in astronomical Bayesian inference require efficient methods for sampling from complex, high-dimensional, often multi-modal probability distributions. Most popular methods, such as Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling, perform…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods allow to sample a distribution known up to a multiplicative constant. Classical MCMC samplers are known to have very poor mixing properties when sampling multimodal distributions. The Equi-Energy…

We make two closely related theoretical contributions to the use of importance sampling schemes. First, for independent sampling, we prove that the minimax optimal trial distribution coincides with the target if and only if the target…

This paper introduces a concept of approximate spectral gap to analyze the mixing time of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms for which the usual spectral gap is degenerate or almost degenerate. We use the idea to analyze a class of…

Recent works leveraging learning to enhance sampling have shown promising results, in particular by designing effective non-local moves and global proposals. However, learning accuracy is inevitably limited in regions where little data is…

While gradient-based discrete samplers are effective in sampling from complex distributions, they are susceptible to getting trapped in local minima, particularly in high-dimensional, multimodal discrete distributions, owing to the…

We show that efficient approximate sampling algorithms, combined with a slow exponential time oracle for computing its output distribution, can be combined into constructing efficient perfect samplers, which sample exactly from a target…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods sample from unnormalized probability distributions and offer guarantees of exact sampling. However, in the continuous case, unfavorable geometry of the target distribution can greatly limit the…

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…

The Metropolis-within-Gibbs (MwG) algorithm is a widely used Markov Chain Monte Carlo method for sampling from high-dimensional distributions when exact conditional sampling is intractable. We study MwG with Random Walk Metropolis (RWM)…

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…

Motivated by the physics of strings and branes, we develop a class of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms involving extended objects. Starting from a collection of parallel Metropolis-Hastings (MH) samplers, we place them on an…

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…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods asymptotically sample from complex probability distributions. The pseudo-marginal MCMC framework only requires an unbiased estimator of the unnormalized probability distribution function to construct…

Autocorrelations in MCMC chains increase the variance of the estimators they produce. We propose the occlusion process to mitigate this problem. It is a process that sits upon an existing MCMC sampler, and occasionally replaces its samples…

We develop a modular approach to Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling for unnormalized target densities. In this approach, Markov chains are constructed in parallel, each constrained to a subset of the target space. The Monte Carlo…