Related papers: On the Convergence of Adaptive Sequential Monte Ca…

Statistical inference in evolutionary models with site-dependence is a long-standing challenge in phylogenetics and computational biology. We consider the problem of approximating marginal sequence likelihoods under dependent-site models of…

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…

Multilevel Splitting is a Sequential Monte Carlo method to simulate realisations of a rare event as well as to estimate its probability. This article is concerned with the convergence and the fluctuation analysis of Adaptive Multilevel…

In a recent paper Beskos et al (2011), the Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) sampler introduced in Del Moral et al (2006), Neal (2001) has been shown to be asymptotically stable in the dimension of the state space d at a cost that is only…

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 propose a new class of learning algorithms that combines variational approximation and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation. Naive algorithms that use the variational approximation as proposal distribution can perform poorly…

Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) has gained popularity over the past few years for the analysis of complex models arising in population genetic, epidemiology and system biology. Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) approaches have become work…

Sliding mode control (SMC) is a robust and computationally efficient solution for tracking control problems of highly nonlinear systems with a great deal of uncertainty. High frequency oscillations due to chattering phenomena and…

Many recent advances in large scale probabilistic inference rely on variational methods. The success of variational approaches depends on (i) formulating a flexible parametric family of distributions, and (ii) optimizing the parameters to…

Bayesian inference for models that have an intractable partition function is known as a doubly intractable problem, where standard Monte Carlo methods are not applicable. The past decade has seen the development of auxiliary variable Monte…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are routinely used to draw samples from distributions with intractable normalization constants. However, standard MCMC algorithms do not apply to doubly-intractable distributions in which there are…

We study the integration of functions with respect to an unknown density. We compare the simple Monte Carlo method (which is almost optimal for a certain large class of inputs) and compare it with the Metropolis algorithm (based on a…

Sliding mode control (SMC) is a robust and computationally efficient model-based controller design technique for highly nonlinear systems, in the presence of model and external uncertainties. However, the implementation of the conventional…

We present adaptive sequential SAA (sample average approximation) algorithms to solve large-scale two-stage stochastic linear programs. The iterative algorithm framework we propose is organized into \emph{outer} and \emph{inner} iterations…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a powerful method for drawing samples from non-standard probability distributions and is utilized across many fields and disciplines. Methods such as Metropolis-Adjusted Langevin (MALA) and Hamiltonian…

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…

We provide a comprehensive characterisation of the theoretical properties of the divide-and-conquer sequential Monte Carlo (DaC-SMC) algorithm. We firmly establish it as a well-founded method by showing that it possesses the same basic…

We prove bounds on the variance of a function $f$ under the empirical measure of the samples obtained by the Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithm, with time complexity depending on local rather than global Markov chain mixing dynamics.…

We propose a new Monte Carlo method for sampling from multimodal distributions. The idea of this technique is based on splitting the task into two: finding the modes of a target distribution $\pi$ and sampling, given the knowledge of the…

Applying standard Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms to large data sets is computationally expensive. Both the calculation of the acceptance probability and the creation of informed proposals usually require an iteration through the…