Related papers: Ergodicity of Approximate MCMC Chains with Applica…
Filtering---estimating the state of a partially observable Markov process from a sequence of observations---is one of the most widely studied problems in control theory, AI, and computational statistics. Exact computation of the posterior…
We study Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms for target distributions defined on matrix spaces. Such an important sampling problem has yet to be analytically explored. We carry out a major step in covering this gap by developing the…
We demonstrate the use of a variational method to determine a quantitative lower bound on the rate of convergence of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms as a function of the target density and proposal density. The bound relies on…
Bayesian inference of Gibbs random fields (GRFs) is often referred to as a doubly intractable problem, since the likelihood function is intractable. The exploration of the posterior distribution of such models is typically carried out with…
There is a tension between robustness and efficiency when designing Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling algorithms. Here we focus on robustness with respect to tuning parameters, showing that more sophisticated algorithms tend to be…
With larger data at their disposal, scientists are emboldened to tackle complex questions that require sophisticated statistical models. It is not unusual for the latter to have likelihood functions that elude analytical formulations. Even…
We establish quantitative bounds for rates of convergence and asymptotic variances for iterated conditional sequential Monte Carlo (i-cSMC) Markov chains and associated particle Gibbs samplers. Our main findings are that the essential…
Time series often exhibit non-ergodic behaviour that complicates forecasting and inference. This article proposes a likelihood-based approach for estimating ergodicity transformations that addresses such challenges. The method is broadly…
To avoid poor empirical performance in Metropolis-Hastings and other accept-reject-based algorithms practitioners often tune them by trial and error. Lower bounds on the convergence rate are developed in both total variation and Wasserstein…
Reversibility is a key property of Markov chains, central to algorithms such as Metropolis-Hastings and other MCMC methods. Yet many applications yield non-reversible chains, motivating the problem of approximating them by reversible ones…
Can we make Bayesian posterior MCMC sampling more efficient when faced with very large datasets? We argue that computing the likelihood for N datapoints in the Metropolis-Hastings (MH) test to reach a single binary decision is…
We study upper and lower bounds on the sample-complexity of learning near-optimal behaviour in finite-state discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). For the upper bound we make the assumption that each action leads to at most two…
The stability and ergodicity properties of two adaptive random walk Metropolis algorithms are considered. The both algorithms adjust the scaling of the proposal distribution continuously based on the observed acceptance probability. Unlike…
This study investigates the limitations of applying Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods to arbitrary objective functions, focusing on a two-block MCMC framework which alternates between Metropolis-Hastings and Gibbs sampling. While such…
We propose a generic Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm to speed up computations for datasets with many observations. A key feature of our approach is the use of the highly efficient difference estimator from the survey sampling…
In many high-impact applications, it is important to ensure the quality of output of a machine learning algorithm as well as its reliability in comparison with the complexity of the algorithm used. In this paper, we have initiated a…
In the following article we consider approximate Bayesian parameter inference for observation driven time series models. Such statistical models appear in a wide variety of applications, including econometrics and applied mathematics. This…
Deriving Bayesian inference for exponential random graph models (ERGMs) is a challenging "doubly intractable" problem as the normalizing constants of the likelihood and posterior density are both intractable. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)…
We study the ergodic behaviour of a discrete-time process $X$ which is a Markov chain in a stationary random environment. The laws of $X_t$ are shown to converge to a limiting law in (weighted) total variation distance as $t\to\infty$.…
Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) methods, which are applicable when the likelihood is difficult or impossible to calculate, are an active topic of current research. Most current ABC algorithms directly approximate the posterior…