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Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are simple and extremely powerful techniques to sample from almost arbitrary distributions. The flaw in practice is that it can take a large and/or unknown amount of time to converge to the…
Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC) is an iterative algorithm used to generate samples from a distribution that is known only up to a normalizing constant. The nonasymptotic dependence of its mixing time on the dimension and target accuracy is…
We propose Decentralized Proximal Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (DE-PSGLD), a decentralized Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm for sampling from a log-concave probability distribution constrained to a convex domain.…
Nested sampling is a powerful approach to Bayesian inference ultimately limited by the computationally demanding task of sampling from a heavily constrained probability distribution. An effective algorithm in its own right, Hamiltonian…
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…
This paper considers stochastic-constrained stochastic optimization where the stochastic constraint is to satisfy that the expectation of a random function is below a certain threshold. In particular, we study the setting where data samples…
Sequential Monte Carlo Samplers are a class of stochastic algorithms for Monte Carlo integral estimation w.r.t. probability distributions, which combine elements of Markov chain Monte Carlo methods and importance sampling/resampling…
Manifold Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms have been introduced to sample more effectively from challenging target densities exhibiting multiple modes or strong correlations. Such algorithms exploit the local geometry of the parameter…
Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms are invaluable tools for exploring stationary properties of physical systems, especially in situations where direct sampling is unfeasible. Common implementations of Monte Carlo algorithms employ…
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…
The need to calibrate increasingly complex statistical models requires a persistent effort for further advances on available, computationally intensive Monte Carlo methods. We study here an advanced version of familiar Markov Chain Monte…
Computing the marginal likelihood (ML) of a model requires marginalizing out all of the parameters and latent variables, a difficult high-dimensional summation or integration problem. To make matters worse, it is often hard to measure the…
We analyze a simple randomized subgradient method for approximating solutions to stochastic systems of convex functional constraints, the only input to the algorithm being the size of minibatches. By introducing a new notion of what is…
We study the problem of generating a sample from the stationary distribution of a Markov chain, given a method to simulate the chain. We give an approximation algorithm for the case of a random walk on a regular graph with n vertices that…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is an efficient and effective means of sampling posterior distributions on Euclidean space, which has been extended to manifolds with boundary. However, some applications require an extension to more general…
Many poker systems, whether created with heuristics or machine learning, rely on the probability of winning as a key input. However calculating the precise probability using combinatorics is an intractable problem, so instead we approximate…
The configuration model is a standard tool for uniformly generating random graphs with a specified degree sequence, and is often used as a null model to evaluate how much of an observed network's structure can be explained by its degree…
We propose a Monte Carlo algorithm to sample from high dimensional probability distributions that combines Markov chain Monte Carlo and importance sampling. We provide a careful theoretical analysis, including guarantees on robustness to…
This review paper, written for the second edition of the Handbook of Markov Chain Monte Carlo, provides an introduction to the study of convergence analysis for Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), aimed at researchers new to the field. We…
We introduce and study several random combinatorial billiard trajectories. Such a system, which depends on a fixed parameter $p\in(0,1)$, models a beam of light that travels in a Euclidean space, occasionally randomly reflecting off of a…