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Recently there have been exciting developments in Monte Carlo methods, with the development of new MCMC and sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithms which are based on continuous-time, rather than discrete-time, Markov processes. This has…

Computation · Statistics 2020-09-29 Paul Fearnhead , Joris Bierkens , Murray Pollock , Gareth O Roberts

Handling multimodality that commonly arises from complicated statistical models remains a challenge. Current Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methodology tackling this subject is based on an ensemble of chains targeting a product of…

Computation · Statistics 2020-12-07 Felipe J Medina-Aguayo , J Andrés Christen

Global fits of physics models require efficient methods for exploring high-dimensional and/or multimodal posterior functions. We introduce a novel method for accelerating Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling by pairing a…

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology · Physics 2023-09-06 N. T. Hunt-Smith , W. Melnitchouk , F. Ringer , N. Sato , A. W Thomas , M. J. White

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are commonly used for their versatility in sampling from complicated probability distributions. However, as the dimension of the distribution gets larger, the computational costs for a satisfactory…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2020-12-01 Hector J. Hortua , Riccardo Volpi , Dimitri Marinelli , Luigi Malago

For large model spaces, the potential entrapment of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) based methods with spike-and-slab priors poses significant challenges in posterior computation in regression models. On the other hand, maximum a posteriori…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-25 Shamriddha De , Joyee Ghosh

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…

Computation · Statistics 2020-03-11 Haoyun Ying , Keheng Mao , Klaus Mosegaard

When working with multimodal Bayesian posterior distributions, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms have difficulty moving between modes, and default variational or mode-based approximate inferences will understate posterior…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-11-19 Yuling Yao , Aki Vehtari , Andrew Gelman

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are often used for approximate inference inside learning, but their slow mixing can be difficult to diagnose and the approximations can seriously degrade learning. To alleviate these issues, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-02-25 Jacob Steinhardt , Percy Liang

Many applications in signal processing require the estimation of some parameters of interest given a set of observed data. More specifically, Bayesian inference needs the computation of {\it a-posteriori} estimators which are often…

Computation · Statistics 2022-01-21 Luca Martino

Probabilistic models are conceptually powerful tools for finding structure in data, but their practical effectiveness is often limited by our ability to perform inference in them. Exact inference is frequently intractable, so approximate…

Computation · Statistics 2014-07-25 Robert Nishihara , Iain Murray , Ryan P. Adams

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms have become powerful tools for Bayesian inference. However, they do not scale well to large-data problems. Divide-and-conquer strategies, which split the data into batches and, for each batch, run…

Computation · Statistics 2017-07-18 Christopher Nemeth , Chris Sherlock

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have not been broadly adopted in Bayesian neural networks (BNNs). This paper initially reviews the main challenges in sampling from the parameter posterior of a neural network via MCMC. Such…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-10-05 Theodore Papamarkou , Jacob Hinkle , M. Todd Young , David Womble

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…

Computation · Statistics 2026-05-05 Joonha Park

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…

Computation · Statistics 2025-02-06 Wei Yuan , Guanyang Wang

Variable selection is a key issue when analyzing high-dimensional data. The explosion of data with large sample sizes and dimensionality brings new challenges to this problem in both inference accuracy and computational complexity. To…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-11-30 Xu Chen , Shaan Qamar , Surya T. Tokdar

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…

Graphics · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Sascha Holl , Gurprit Singh , Hans-Peter Seidel

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling of posterior distributions arising in Bayesian inverse problems is challenging when evaluations of the forward model are computationally expensive. Replacing the forward model with a low-cost,…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2018-08-29 Benjamin Peherstorfer , Youssef Marzouk

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…

Computation · Statistics 2018-04-12 Christian P. Robert , Victor Elvira , Nick Tawn , Changye Wu

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) provides a feasible method for inferring Hidden Markov models, however, it is often computationally prohibitive, especially constrained by the curse of dimensionality, as the Monte Carlo sampler traverses…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-09-13 Xiongming Dai , Gerald Baumgartner

As it has become common to use many computer cores in routine applications, finding good ways to parallelize popular algorithms has become increasingly important. In this paper, we present a parallelization scheme for Markov chain Monte…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-06-01 Guillaume W. Basse , Natesh S. Pillai , Aaron Smith