Related papers: Twisting the Alive Particle Filter
This paper develops a Bayesian computational platform at the interface between posterior sampling and optimization in models whose marginal likelihoods are difficult to evaluate. Inspired by adversarial optimization, namely Generative…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, such as the Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithm, are widely used for Bayesian inference. One of the most important issues for any MCMC method is the convergence of the Markov chain, which depends…
An accurate algorithm is proposed to improve the prediction of a particle in collision with a moving wall within the direct simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) framework for the simulation of unsteady rarefied flows. This algorithm is able to…
Density tempering (also called density annealing) is a sequential Monte Carlo approach to Bayesian inference for general state models; it is an alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo. When applied to state space models, it moves a…
We show that it is feasible to carry out exact Bayesian inference for non-Gaussian state space models using an adaptive Metropolis Hastings sampling scheme with the likelihood approximated by the particle filter. Furthermore, an adapyive…
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…
Modern parallel computing devices, such as the graphics processing unit (GPU), have gained significant traction in scientific and statistical computing. They are particularly well-suited to data-parallel algorithms such as the particle…
In this paper, we propose a novel approach to Bayesian experimental design for non-exchangeable data that formulates it as risk-sensitive policy optimization. We develop the Inside-Out SMC$^2$ algorithm, a nested sequential Monte Carlo…
This paper proposes a synergy of amortised and particle-based methods for sampling from distributions defined by unnormalised density functions. We state a connection between sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) and neural sequential samplers…
In parameter estimation problems one computes a posterior distribution over uncertain parameters defined jointly by a prior distribution, a model, and noisy data. Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is often used for the numerical solution of…
Monte Carlo algorithms are a foundational pillar of modern computational science, yet their effective application hinges on a deep understanding of their performance trade offs. This paper presents a critical analysis of the evolution of…
We present a new version of the truncated harmonic mean estimator (THAMES) for univariate or multivariate mixture models. The estimator computes the marginal likelihood from Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) samples, is consistent,…
Numerous capability and safety techniques of Large Language Models (LLMs), including RLHF, automated red-teaming, prompt engineering, and infilling, can be cast as sampling from an unnormalized target distribution defined by a given reward…
We propose a new method called the Metropolis-adjusted Mirror Langevin algorithm for approximate sampling from distributions whose support is a compact and convex set. This algorithm adds an accept-reject filter to the Markov chain induced…
It has become increasingly easy nowadays to collect approximate posterior samples via fast algorithms such as variational Bayes, but concerns exist about the estimation accuracy. It is tempting to build solutions that exploit approximate…
Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods, also known as particle filters, constitute a class of algorithms used to approximate expectations with respect to a sequence of probability distributions as well as the normalising constants of those…
State-space models (SSMs) are commonly used to model time series data where the observations depend on an unobserved latent process. However, inference on the model parameters of an SSM can be challenging, especially when the likelihood of…
We propose nested sequential Monte Carlo (NSMC), a methodology to sample from sequences of probability distributions, even where the random variables are high-dimensional. NSMC generalises the SMC framework by requiring only approximate,…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is an efficient Bayesian sampling method that can make distant proposals in the parameter space by simulating a Hamiltonian dynamical system. Despite its popularity in machine learning and data science, HMC is…
Nonlinear non-Gaussian state-space models arise in numerous applications in statistics and signal processing. In this context, one of the most successful and popular approximation techniques is the Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithm,…