Related papers: Auxiliary-variable Exact Hamiltonian Monte Carlo S…

We unify slice sampling and Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) sampling, demonstrating their connection via the Hamiltonian-Jacobi equation from Hamiltonian mechanics. This insight enables extension of HMC and slice sampling to a broader family…

We introduce a new family of MCMC samplers that combine auxiliary variables, Gibbs sampling and Taylor expansions of the target density. Our approach permits the marginalisation over the auxiliary variables yielding marginal samplers, or…

We develop an efficient posterior sampling scheme for the Poisson INGARCH models. The proposed method is based on the approximation of the posterior density that exploits the Poisson limit of the negative binomial distribution. It allows us…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms, the method of choice to sample from generic high-dimensional distributions, are rarely used for continuous one-dimensional distributions, for which more effective approaches are usually available (e.g.…

We propose an adaptive importance sampling scheme for Gaussian approximations of intractable posteriors. Optimization-based approximations like variational inference can be too inaccurate while existing Monte Carlo methods can be too slow.…

High-dimensional data are routinely collected in many areas. We are particularly interested in Bayesian classification models in which one or more variables are imbalanced. Current Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms for posterior…

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) has been progressively incorporated within the statistician's toolbox as an alternative sampling method in settings when standard Metropolis-Hastings is inefficient. HMC generates a Markov chain on an augmented…

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…

In this paper we consider fully Bayesian inference in general state space models. Existing particle Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms use an augmented model that takes into account all the variable sampled in a sequential Monte…

The Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) sampling algorithm exploits Hamiltonian dynamics to construct efficient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), which has become increasingly popular in machine learning and statistics. Since HMC uses the gradient…

Many machine learning applications require operating on a spatially distributed dataset. Despite technological advances, privacy considerations and communication constraints may prevent gathering the entire dataset in a central unit. In…

Population Monte Carlo (PMC) sampling methods are powerful tools for approximating distributions of static unknowns given a set of observations. These methods are iterative in nature: at each step they generate samples from a proposal…

We describe a general strategy for sampling configurations from a given distribution, NOT based on the standard Metropolis (Markov chain) strategy. It uses the fact that nontrivial problems in statistical physics are high dimensional and…

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is widely used for sampling from high dimensional target distributions with densities known up to proportionality. While HMC exhibits favorable scaling properties in high dimensions, it struggles with strongly…

Statisticians often use Monte Carlo methods to approximate probability distributions, primarily with Markov chain Monte Carlo and importance sampling. Sequential Monte Carlo samplers are a class of algorithms that combine both techniques to…

Markov chain Monte Carlo methods have become standard tools in statistics to sample from complex probability measures. Many available techniques rely on discrete-time reversible Markov chains whose transition kernels build up over the…

In Bayesian inverse problems, one aims at characterizing the posterior distribution of a set of unknowns, given indirect measurements. For non-linear/non-Gaussian problems, analytic solutions are seldom available: Sequential Monte Carlo…

Sequential Monte Carlo samplers represent a compelling approach to posterior inference in Bayesian models, due to being parallelisable and providing an unbiased estimate of the posterior normalising constant. In this work, we significantly…

Sampling from high dimensional distributions is a computational bottleneck in many scientific applications. Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC), and in particular the No-U-Turn Sampler (NUTS), are widely used, yet they struggle on problems with a…

We present a new method for conducting Monte Carlo inference in graphical models which combines explicit search with generalized importance sampling. The idea is to reduce the variance of importance sampling by searching for significant…