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The Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) method has been recognized as a powerful sampling tool in computational statistics. We show that performance of HMC can be significantly improved by incorporating importance sampling and an irreversible…

Computation · Statistics 2019-07-26 Tijana Radivojević , Elena Akhmatskaya

Bayesian inference is useful to obtain a predictive distribution with a small generalization error. However, since posterior distributions are rarely evaluated analytically, we employ the variational Bayesian inference or sampling method to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Yohei Saito , Shun Kimura , Koujin Takeda

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is an efficient method of simulating smooth distributions and has motivated the widely used No-U-turn Sampler (NUTS) and software Stan. We build on NUTS and the technique of "unbiased sampling" to design HMC…

Computation · Statistics 2022-12-26 George M. Leigh , Amanda R. Northrop

This paper focuses on variational inference with intractable likelihood functions that can be unbiasedly estimated. A flexible variational approximation based on Gaussian mixtures is developed, by adopting the mixture population Monte Carlo…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2021-12-02 Zhijian He , Shifeng Huo , Tianhui Yang

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a state of the art method for sampling from distributions with differentiable densities, but can converge slowly when applied to challenging multimodal problems. Running HMC with a time varying Hamiltonian,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-26 Reuben Cohn-Gordon , Uroš Seljak , Dries Sels

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) has emerged as a powerful Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method to sample from complex continuous distributions. However, a fundamental limitation of HMC is that it can not be applied to distributions with…

Computation · Statistics 2021-12-10 Guangyao Zhou

It was recently shown that path integral Monte Carlo can be used to directly compute partition functions of Hamiltonians with vibronic coupling [J. Chem. Phys. 148, 194110 (2018)]. While the importance sampling Monte Carlo integration…

Chemical Physics · Physics 2019-12-30 Dmitri Iouchtchenko , Neil Raymond , Pierre-Nicholas Roy , Marcel Nooijen

Drawing a sample from a discrete distribution is one of the building components for Monte Carlo methods. Like other sampling algorithms, discrete sampling suffers from the high computational burden in large-scale inference problems. We…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-04-29 Yutian Chen , Zoubin Ghahramani

In many problems, complex non-Gaussian and/or nonlinear models are required to accurately describe a physical system of interest. In such cases, Monte Carlo algorithms are remarkably flexible and extremely powerful approaches to solve such…

Computation · Statistics 2015-04-23 Thi Le Thu Nguyen , Francois Septier , Gareth W. Peters , Yves Delignon

Using Markov chain Monte Carlo to sample from posterior distributions was the key innovation which made Bayesian data analysis practical. Notoriously, however, MCMC is hard to tune, hard to diagnose, and hard to parallelize. This…

Computation · Statistics 2022-03-18 Cosma Rohilla Shalizi

In this paper we demonstrate that multi-modal Probability Distribution Functions (PDFs) may be efficiently sampled using an algorithm originally developed for numerical integrations by Monte-Carlo methods. This algorithm can be used to…

Computational Physics · Physics 2009-10-31 K. J. Abraham , L. M. Haines

Sequential Monte Carlo has become a standard tool for Bayesian Inference of complex models. This approach can be computationally demanding, especially when initialized from the prior distribution. On the other hand, deter-ministic…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-07-26 Sophie Donnet , Stéphane Robin

We provide a general methodology for unbiased estimation for intractable stochastic models. We consider situations where the target distribution can be written as an appropriate limit of distributions, and where conventional approaches…

Methodology · Statistics 2014-12-01 Sergios Agapiou , Gareth O. Roberts , Sebastian J. Vollmer

Sampling-based inference has seen a surge of interest in recent years. Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) has emerged as a powerful algorithm that leverages concepts from Hamiltonian dynamics to efficiently explore complex target distributions.…

Computation · Statistics 2026-04-07 Arghya Mukherjee , Dootika Vats

We propose a Bayesian elastic net that uses empirical likelihood and develop an efficient tuning of Hamiltonian Monte Carlo for posterior sampling. The proposed model relaxes the assumptions on the identity of the error distribution,…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-07-20 Chul Moon , Adel Bedoui

Adaptive importance sampling is a class of techniques for finding good proposal distributions for importance sampling. Often the proposal distributions are standard probability distributions whose parameters are adapted based on the…

Computation · Statistics 2021-03-10 Topi Paananen , Juho Piironen , Paul-Christian Bürkner , Aki Vehtari

Traditional gradient-based sampling methods, like standard Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, require that the desired target distribution is continuous and differentiable. This limits the types of models one can define, although the presented models…

Computation · Statistics 2025-04-28 Jimmy Huy Tran , Tore Selland Kleppe

Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods are widely used in signal processing and communications for statistical inference and stochastic optimization. In this work, we introduce an efficient adaptive Metropolis-Hastings algorithm to draw samples…

Computation · Statistics 2016-03-17 David Luengo , Luca Martino

The Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) algorithm is often lauded for its ability to effectively sample from high-dimensional distributions. In this paper we challenge the presumed domination of HMC for the Bayesian analysis of GLMs. By utilizing…

The Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithm is one of the most widely used Markov Chain Monte Carlo schemes for generating samples from Bayesian posterior distributions. The algorithm is asymptotically exact, flexible and easy to implement.…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-10 Estevão Prado , Christopher Nemeth , Chris Sherlock