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We propose Adaptive Incremental Mixture Markov chain Monte Carlo (AIMM), a novel approach to sample from challenging probability distributions defined on a general state-space. While adaptive MCMC methods usually update a parametric…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-06-01 Florian Maire , Nial Friel , Antonietta Mira , Adrian Raftery

We propose an adaptive Metropolis-Hastings algorithm in which sampled data are used to update the proposal distribution. We use the samples found by the algorithm at a particular step to form the information-theoretically optimal mean-field…

Other Condensed Matter · Physics 2007-05-23 David H. Wolpert , Chiu Fan Lee

Computing partition functions, the normalizing constants of probability distributions, is often hard. Variants of importance sampling give unbiased estimates of a normalizer Z, however, unbiased estimates of the reciprocal 1/Z are harder to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-03-14 Colin Wei , Iain Murray

A method is presented to exploit adaptive integration algorithms using importance sampling, like VEGAS, for the task of scanning theoretical predictions depending on a multi-dimensional parameter space. Usually, a parameter scan is…

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology · Physics 2010-04-05 Oliver Brein

This paper introduces a high-order Markov chain task to investigate how transformers learn to integrate information from multiple past positions with varying statistical significance. We demonstrate that transformers learn this task…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Oğuz Kaan Yüksel , Rodrigo Alvarez Lucendo , Nicolas Flammarion

Advances in sampling schemes for Markov jump processes have recently enabled multiple inferential tasks. However, in statistical and machine learning applications, we often require that these continuous-time models find support on…

Computation · Statistics 2018-06-08 Iker Perez , Lax Chan , Mercedes Torres Torres , James Goulding , Theodore Kypraios

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are employed to sample from a given distribution of interest, whenever either the distribution does not exist in closed form, or, if it does, no efficient method to simulate an independent sample from…

Computation · Statistics 2008-07-22 Ioana A. Cosma , Masoud Asgharian

Efficient sampling of many-dimensional and multimodal density functions is a task of great interest in many research fields. We describe an algorithm that allows parallelizing inherently serial Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling by…

Computation · Statistics 2020-08-10 Vasyl Hafych , Philipp Eller , Oliver Schulz , Allen Caldwell

Stochastic reaction networks are mathematical models with a wide range of applications in biochemistry, ecology, and epidemiology, and are often complex to analyze. Except for some special cases, it is generally difficult to predict how the…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-04-02 Daniele Cappelletti , Giulio Cuniberti , Paola Siri

Adaptive importance sampling (AIS) methods provide a useful alternative to Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms for performing inference of intractable distributions. Population Monte Carlo (PMC) algorithms constitute a family of AIS…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-12-13 Soumyasundar Pal , Antonios Valkanas , Mark Coates

We develop an algorithm for automatic differentiation of Metropolis-Hastings samplers, allowing us to differentiate through probabilistic inference, even if the model has discrete components within it. Our approach fuses recent advances in…

Infinite hidden Markov models provide a flexible framework for modelling time series with structural changes and complex dynamics, without requiring the number of latent states to be specified in advance. This flexibility is achieved…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-04 Federico P. Cortese , Luca Rossini

Importance sampling is a Monte Carlo technique for efficiently estimating the likelihood of rare events by biasing the sampling distribution towards the rare event of interest. By drawing weighted samples from a learned proposal…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-20 Liam A. Kruse , Marc R. Schlichting , Mykel J. Kochenderfer

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-09 Zengyi Li , Yubei Chen , Friedrich T. Sommer

We investigate the efficiency of a marginal likelihood estimator where the product of the marginal posterior distributions is used as an importance-sampling function. The approach is generally applicable to multi-block parameter vector…

Computation · Statistics 2014-07-08 K. Perrakis , I. Ntzoufras , E. G. Tsionas

Variational inference (VI) and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) are two main approximate approaches for learning deep generative models by maximizing marginal likelihood. In this paper, we propose using annealed importance sampling for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-18 Xinqiang Ding , David J. Freedman

Delayed-acceptance Markov chain Monte Carlo (DA-MCMC) samples from a probability distribution via a two-stages version of the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm, by combining the target distribution with a "surrogate" (i.e. an approximate and…

We develop a new method to sample from posterior distributions in hierarchical models without using Markov chain Monte Carlo. This method, which is a variant of importance sampling ideas, is generally applicable to high-dimensional models…

Computation · Statistics 2015-03-19 Michael Braun , Paul Damien

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are often used for approximate inference inside learning, but their slow mixing can be difficult to diagnose and the approximations can seriously degrade learning. To alleviate these issues, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-02-25 Jacob Steinhardt , Percy Liang

This study presents an importance sampling formulation based on adaptively relaxing parameters from the indicator function and/or the probability density function. The formulation embodies the prevalent mathematical concept of relaxing a…

Applications · Statistics 2024-04-11 Jianhua Xian , Ziqi Wang