Related papers: Variational MCMC
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are commonly used for their versatility in sampling from complicated probability distributions. However, as the dimension of the distribution gets larger, the computational costs for a satisfactory…
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…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are powerful computational tools for analysis of complex statistical problems. However, their computational efficiency is highly dependent on the chosen proposal distribution, which is generally…
Variable selection is a key issue when analyzing high-dimensional data. The explosion of data with large sample sizes and dimensionality brings new challenges to this problem in both inference accuracy and computational complexity. To…
Practitioners of Bayesian statistics have long depended on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) to obtain samples from intractable posterior distributions. Unfortunately, MCMC algorithms are typically serial, and do not scale to the large…
We explore a general framework in Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling where sequential proposals are tried as a candidate for the next state of the Markov chain. This sequential-proposal framework can be applied to various existing…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have a drawback when working with a target distribution or likelihood function that is computationally expensive to evaluate, specially when working with big data. This paper focuses on…
A Kernel Adaptive Metropolis-Hastings algorithm is introduced, for the purpose of sampling from a target distribution with strongly nonlinear support. The algorithm embeds the trajectory of the Markov chain into a reproducing kernel Hilbert…
Adaptive and interacting Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms (MCMC) have been recently introduced in the literature. These novel simulation algorithms are designed to increase the simulation efficiency to sample complex distributions.…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a class of algorithms to sample complex and high-dimensional probability distributions. The Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithm, the workhorse of MCMC, provides a simple recipe to construct reversible…
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…
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…
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…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are based on the construction of a Markov chain with transition probabilities leaving invariant a probability distribution of interest. In this work, we look at these transition probabilities as…
The design of the proposal distributions, and most notably the kernel parameters, are crucial for the performance of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) rendering. A poor selection of parameters can increase the correlation of the Markov chain…
In this paper, we address the challenge of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms within the approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) framework, which often get trapped in local optima due to their inherent local exploration mechanism. We…
Bayesian inference in the presence of an intractable likelihood function is computationally challenging. When following a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach to approximate the posterior distribution in this context, one typically…
The problem of optimally scaling the proposal distribution in a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm is critical to the quality of the generated samples. Much work has gone into obtaining such results for various Metropolis-Hastings (MH)…
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…
Traditional MCMC algorithms are computationally intensive and do not scale well to large data. In particular, the Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithm requires passing over the entire dataset to evaluate the likelihood ratio in each…