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Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) is a methodology for sampling approximately from a sequence of probability distributions of increasing dimension and estimating their normalizing constants. We propose here an alternative methodology named…

We present a proof showing that the weak error of a system of $n$ interacting stochastic particles approximating the solution of the McKean-Vlasov equation is $\mathcal O(n^{-1})$. Our proof is based on the Kolmogorov backward equation for…

We present a Markov-chain analysis of blockwise-stochastic algorithms for solving partially block-separable optimization problems. Our main contributions to the extensive literature on these methods are statements about the Markov operators…

This paper studies the mixing time of certain adaptive Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms. Under some regularity conditions, we show that the convergence rate of Importance Resampling MCMC (IRMCMC) algorithm, measured in terms of the total…

Many machine learning and optimization algorithms can be cast as instances of stochastic approximation (SA). The convergence rate of these algorithms is known to be slow, with the optimal mean squared error (MSE) of order $O(n^{-1})$. In…

We develop a theory of weak Poincar\'e inequalities to characterize convergence rates of ergodic Markov chains. Motivated by the application of Markov chains in the context of algorithms, we develop a relevant set of tools which enable the…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) requires to evaluate the full data likelihood at different parameter values iteratively and is often computationally infeasible for large data sets. In this paper, we propose to approximate the log-likelihood…

We propose a novel stochastic approximation algorithm, termed PMQSopt, for solving weakly convex stochastic optimization problems involving expectation-valued functions. The algorithm is constructed by integrating the proximal method of…

Social sampling is a novel randomized message passing protocol inspired by social communication for opinion formation in social networks. In a typical social sampling algorithm, each agent holds a sample from the empirical distribution of…

Community structure is common in many real networks, with nodes clustered in groups sharing the same connections patterns. While many community detection methods have been developed for networks with binary edges, few of them are applicable…

Controlled branching processes are stochastic growth population models in which the number of individuals with reproductive capacity in each generation is controlled by a random control function. The purpose of this work is to examine the…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are generally regarded as the gold standard technique for Bayesian inference. They are theoretically well-understood and conceptually simple to apply in practice. The drawback of MCMC is that in…

Chance-constrained problems involve stochastic components in the constraints which can be violated with a small probability. We investigate the impact of different types of chance constraints on the performance of iterative search…

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…

We study a class of weakly identifiable location-scale mixture models for which the maximum likelihood estimates based on $n$ i.i.d. samples are known to have lower accuracy than the classical $n^{- \frac{1}{2}}$ error. We investigate…

Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods represent a classical set of techniques to simulate a sequence of probability measures through a simple selection/mutation mechanism. However, the associated selection functions and mutation kernels…

This paper presents a class of new algorithms for distributed statistical estimation that exploit divide-and-conquer approach. We show that one of the key benefits of the divide-and-conquer strategy is robustness, an important…

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.…

With a weighting scheme proportional to t, a traditional stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm achieves a high probability convergence rate of O({\kappa}/T) for strongly convex functions, instead of O({\kappa} ln(T)/T). We also prove…

Parametric Markov chains (pMC) are used to model probabilistic systems with unknown or partially known probabilities. Although (universal) pMC verification for reachability properties is known to be coETR-complete, there have been efforts…