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Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are routinely used to draw samples from distributions with intractable normalization constants. However, standard MCMC algorithms do not apply to doubly-intractable distributions in which there are…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a powerful methodology for the approximation of posterior distributions. However, the iterative nature of MCMC does not naturally facilitate its use with modern highly parallel computation on HPC and cloud…
We focus on generative autoencoders, such as variational or adversarial autoencoders, which jointly learn a generative model alongside an inference model. Generative autoencoders are those which are trained to softly enforce a prior on the…
Monte Carlo methods -- such as Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and piecewise deterministic Markov process (PDMP) samplers -- provide asymptotically exact estimators of expectations under a target distribution. There is growing interest in…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are simulated by local exploration of complex statistical distributions, and while bypassing the cumbersome requirement of a specific analytical expression for the target, this stochastic exploration…
We make two closely related theoretical contributions to the use of importance sampling schemes. First, for independent sampling, we prove that the minimax optimal trial distribution coincides with the target if and only if the target…
We study time-changed Markov processes to speed up the convergence of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. The time-changed process is defined by adjusting the speed of time of a base process via a user-chosen, state-dependent…
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…
Delayed-acceptance Markov chain Monte Carlo (DA-MCMC) samples from a probability distribution via a two-stages version of the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm, by combining the target distribution with a "surrogate" (i.e. an approximate and…
When targeting a distribution that is artificially invariant under some permutations, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms face the label-switching problem, rendering marginal inference particularly cumbersome. Such a situation…
Parallel tempering (PT) is a class of Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms that constructs a path of distributions annealing between a tractable reference and an intractable target, and then interchanges states along the path to improve…
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…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are often used in clustering since they guarantee asymptotically exact expectations in the infinite-time limit. In finite time, though, slow mixing often leads to poor performance. Modern computing…
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…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are indispensable when sampling from a complex, high-dimensional distribution by a conventional method is intractable. Even though MCMC is a powerful tool, it is also hard to control and tune in…
We develop a novel Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method that exploits a hierarchy of models of increasing complexity to efficiently generate samples from an unnormalized target distribution. Broadly, the method rewrites the Multilevel…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods such as Gibbs sampling are finding widespread use in applied statistics and machine learning. These often lead to difficult computational problems, which are increasingly being solved on parallel and…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is an established approach for uncertainty quantification and propagation in scientific applications. A key challenge in applying MCMC to scientific domains is computation: the target density of interest is…
Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms are used to simulate from complex statistical distributions by way of a local exploration of these distributions. This local feature avoids heavy requests on understanding the nature of the target, but it…
The Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are popular when considering sampling from a high-dimensional random variable $\mathbf{x}$ with possibly unnormalised probability density $p$ and observed data $\mathbf{d}$. However, MCMC requires…