Related papers: Asymptotically Exact, Embarrassingly Parallel MCMC

We present a general framework for accelerating a large class of widely used Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. Our approach exploits fast, iterative approximations to the target density to speculatively evaluate many potential…

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…

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…

In this paper we study from a numerical analysis perspective the Fractional Step Kinetic Monte Carlo (FS-KMC) algorithms proposed in [1] for the parallel simulation of spatially distributed particle systems on a lattice. FS-KMC are…

We introduce a new Markov-Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach designed for efficient sampling of highly correlated and multimodal posteriors. Parallel tempering, though effective, is a costly technique for sampling such posteriors. Our…

In sampling tasks, it is common for target distributions to be known up to a normalizing constant. However, in many situations, even evaluating the unnormalized distribution can be costly or infeasible. This issue arises in scenarios such…

The Dirichlet process (DP) is a fundamental mathematical tool for Bayesian nonparametric modeling, and is widely used in tasks such as density estimation, natural language processing, and time series modeling. Although MCMC inference…

Indian Buffet Process based models are an elegant way for discovering underlying features within a data set, but inference in such models can be slow. Inferring underlying features using Markov chain Monte Carlo either relies on an…

We develop a modular approach to Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling for unnormalized target densities. In this approach, Markov chains are constructed in parallel, each constrained to a subset of the target space. The Monte Carlo…

Posterior sampling is a task of central importance in Bayesian inference. For many applications in Bayesian meta-analysis and Bayesian transfer learning, the prior distribution is unknown and needs to be estimated from samples. In practice,…

We present a mathematical framework for constructing and analyzing parallel algorithms for lattice Kinetic Monte Carlo (KMC) simulations. The resulting algorithms have the capacity to simulate a wide range of spatio-temporal scales in…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods provide consistent of integrals as the number of iterations goes to infinity. MCMC estimators are generally biased after any fixed number of iterations. We propose to remove this bias by using…

Gibbs sampling is a widely used Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method for numerically approximating integrals of interest in Bayesian statistics and other mathematical sciences. Many implementations of MCMC methods do not extend easily to…

We introduce a new embarrassingly parallel parameter learning algorithm for Markov random fields with untied parameters which is efficient for a large class of practical models. Our algorithm parallelizes naturally over cliques and, for…

Decision trees are highly famous in machine learning and usually acquire state-of-the-art performance. Despite that, well-known variants like CART, ID3, random forest, and boosted trees miss a probabilistic version that encodes prior…

We introduce a new version of particle filter in which the number of "children" of a particle at a given time has a Poisson distribution. As a result, the number of particles is random and varies with time. An advantage of this scheme is…

Dirichlet Process Mixture Models (DPMMs) are widely used to address clustering problems. Their main advantage lies in their ability to automatically estimate the number of clusters during the inference process through the Bayesian…

Monte Carlo algorithms simulate some prescribed number of samples, taking some random real time to complete the computations necessary. This work considers the converse: to impose a real-time budget on the computation, which results in the…

This paper introduces a framework for speeding up Bayesian inference conducted in presence of large datasets. We design a Markov chain whose transition kernel uses an (unknown) fraction of (fixed size) of the available data that is randomly…

Sampling from posterior distributions using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods can require an exhaustive number of iterations, particularly when the posterior is multi-modal as the MCMC sampler can become trapped in a local mode for a…