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Bayesian inference for factorial hidden Markov models is challenging due to the exponentially sized latent variable space. Standard Monte Carlo samplers can have difficulties effectively exploring the posterior landscape and are often…
Multicanonical MCMC (Multicanonical Markov Chain Monte Carlo; Multicanonical Monte Carlo) is discussed as a method of rare event sampling. Starting from a review of the generic framework of importance sampling, multicanonical MCMC is…
Consider a Markov chain defined on a finite state space, X, that leaves invariant the uniform distribution on X, and whose transition probabilities are integer multiples of 1/Q, for some integer Q. I show how a simulation of n transitions…
We present a novel method for reducing the computational complexity of rigorously estimating the partition functions (normalizing constants) of Gibbs (Boltzmann) distributions, which arise ubiquitously in probabilistic graphical models. A…
We propose a new class of learning algorithms that combines variational approximation and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation. Naive algorithms that use the variational approximation as proposal distribution can perform poorly…
Two popular classes of methods for approximate inference are Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and variational inference. MCMC tends to be accurate if run for a long enough time, while variational inference tends to give better approximations…
Bayesian inference for doubly-intractable pairwise exponential graphical models typically involves variations of the exchange algorithm or approximate Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) samplers. However, existing methods for both classes of…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods become increasingly popular in applied mathematics as a tool for numerical integration with respect to complex and high-dimensional distributions. However, application of MCMC methods to heavy tailed…
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 introduce an algorithm to systematically improve the efficiency of parallel tempering Monte Carlo simulations by optimizing the simulated temperature set. Our approach is closely related to a recently introduced adaptive algorithm that…
We propose a novel approximate inference algorithm that approximates a target distribution by amortising the dynamics of a user-selected MCMC sampler. The idea is to initialise MCMC using samples from an approximation network, apply the…
It is common practice in Markov chain Monte Carlo to update the simulation one variable (or sub-block of variables) at a time, rather than conduct a single full-dimensional update. When it is possible to draw from each full-conditional…
The Monte Carlo with Absorbing Markov Chains (MCAMC) method is introduced. This method is a generalization of the rejection-free method known as the $n$-fold way. The MCAMC algorithm is applied to the study of the very low-temperature…
The study of animal behavioural states inferred through hidden Markov models and similar state switching models has seen a significant increase in popularity in recent years. The ability to account for varying levels of behavioural scale…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are ubiquitous in probability theory in general and in machine learning in particular. A Markov chain is devised so that its stationary distribution is some probability distribution of interest.…
Both resources in the natural environment and concepts in a semantic space are distributed "patchily", with large gaps in between the patches. To describe people's internal and external foraging behavior, various random walk models have…
This paper considers a new approach to using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) in contexts where one may adopt multilevel (ML) Monte Carlo. The underlying problem is to approximate expectations w.r.t. an underlying probability measure that is…
Sampling from multimodal distributions is a challenging task in scientific computing. When a distribution has an exact symmetry between the modes, direct jumps among them can accelerate the samplings significantly. However, the…
We propose a Monte Carlo sampler from the reverse diffusion process. Unlike the practice of diffusion models, where the intermediary updates -- the score functions -- are learned with a neural network, we transform the score matching…
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…