Related papers: The Containment Condition and AdapFail algorithms

We consider Metropolis Hastings MCMC in cases where the log of the ratio of target distributions is replaced by an estimator. The estimator is based on m samples from an independent online Monte Carlo simulation. Under some conditions on…

In this paper, we introduce a slight variation of the Dominated Coupling From the Past algorithm (DCFTP) of Kendall, for bounded Markov chains. It is based on the control of a (typically non-monotonic) stochastic recursion by a (typically…

Although adaptive optimization algorithms have been successful in many applications, there are still some mysteries in terms of convergence analysis that have not been unraveled. This paper provides a novel non-convex analysis of adaptive…

This study investigates the limitations of applying Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods to arbitrary objective functions, focusing on a two-block MCMC framework which alternates between Metropolis-Hastings and Gibbs sampling. While such…

Submodular maximization is a classic algorithmic problem with multiple applications in data mining and machine learning; there, the growing need to deal with massive instances motivates the design of algorithms balancing the quality of the…

Reparameterizing a probabilisitic system is common advice for improving the performance of a statistical algorithm like Markov chain Monte Carlo, even though in theory such reparameterizations should leave the system, and the performance of…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling is an important and commonly used tool for the analysis of hierarchical models. Nevertheless, practitioners generally have two options for MCMC: utilize existing software that generates a black-box…

We formulate gradient-based Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling as optimization on the space of probability measures, with Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence as the objective functional. We show that an underdamped form of the Langevin…

Markov chain Monte Carlo(MCMC) is a popular approach to sample from high dimensional distributions, and the asymptotic variance is a commonly used criterion to evaluate the performance. While most popular MCMC algorithms are reversible,…

We study \emph{online episodic Constrained Markov Decision Processes} (CMDPs) under both stochastic and adversarial constraints. We provide a novel algorithm whose guarantees greatly improve those of the state-of-the-art best-of-both-worlds…

We investigate the problem of monitoring partially observable systems with nondeterministic and probabilistic dynamics. In such systems, every state may be associated with a risk, e.g., the probability of an imminent crash. During runtime,…

Analysis of the convergence rates of modern convex optimization algorithms can be achived through binary means: analysis of emperical convergence, or analysis of theoretical convergence. These two pathways of capturing information diverge…

Chance-constrained programs (CCPs) constitute a difficult class of stochastic programs due to its possible nondifferentiability and nonconvexity even with simple linear random functionals. Existing approaches for solving the CCPs mainly…

We investigate the use of the Multiple Optimised Parameter Estimation and Data compression algorithm (MOPED) for data compression and faster evaluation of likelihood functions. Since MOPED only guarantees maintaining the Fisher matrix of…

We propose a new sampling algorithm combining two quite powerful ideas in the Markov chain Monte Carlo literature -- adaptive Metropolis sampler and two-stage Metropolis-Hastings sampler. The proposed sampling method will be particularly…

Conditional Monte Carlo (CMC) has been widely used for sensitivity estimation with discontinuous integrands as a standard simulation technique. A major limitation of using CMC in this context is that finding conditioning variables to ensure…

Motivated by robotic surveillance applications, this paper studies the novel problem of maximizing the return time entropy of a Markov chain, subject to a graph topology with travel times and stationary distribution. The return time entropy…

Monte Carlo methods, such as Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms, have become very popular in signal processing over the last years. In this work, we introduce a novel MCMC scheme where parallel MCMC chains interact, adapting…

Herein, the Hidden Markov Model is expanded to allow for Markov chain observations. In particular, the observations are assumed to be a Markov chain whose one step transition probabilities depend upon the hidden Markov chain. An…

This paper considers a new approach to using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) in contexts where one may adopt multilevel (ML) Monte Carlo. The underlying problem is to approximate expectations w.r.t. an underlying probability measure that is…