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Markov chain Monte Carlo is a method of producing a correlated sample in order to estimate features of a target distribution via ergodic averages. A fundamental question is when should sampling stop? That is, when are the ergodic averages…
In many real-world engineering systems, the performance or reliability of the system is characterised by a scalar parameter. The distribution of this performance parameter is important in many uncertainty quantification problems, ranging…
Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithms were originally designed for estimating intractable conditional expectations within state-space models, but are now routinely used to generate approximate samples in the context of general-purpose…
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…
This article describes a method for using optimization to derive efficient independent transition functions for Markov chain Monte Carlo simulations. Our interest is in sampling from a posterior density $\pi(x)$ for problems in which the…
We study statistical model checking of continuous-time stochastic hybrid systems. The challenge in applying statistical model checking to these systems is that one cannot simulate such systems exactly. We employ the multilevel Monte Carlo…
We introduce a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm to generate samples from probability distributions supported on a $d$-dimensional lattice $\Lambda = \mathbf{B}\mathbb{Z}^d$, where $\mathbf{B}$ is a full-rank matrix. Specifically,…
A system to update estimates from a sequence of probability distributions is presented. The aim of the system is to quickly produce estimates with a user-specified bound on the Monte Carlo error. The estimates are based upon weighted…
Slice sampling is a well-established Markov chain Monte Carlo method for (approximate) sampling of target distributions which are only known up to a normalizing constant. The method is based on choosing a new state on a slice, i.e., a…
Sampling from distributions play a crucial role in aiding practitioners with statistical inference. However, in numerous situations, obtaining exact samples from complex distributions is infeasible. Consequently, researchers often turn to…
A core problem in statistics and probabilistic machine learning is to compute probability distributions and expectations. This is the fundamental problem of Bayesian statistics and machine learning, which frames all inference as…
With its systematic exploration of probability distributions, Hamiltonian Monte Carlo is a potent Markov Chain Monte Carlo technique; it is an approach, however, ultimately contingent on the choice of a suitable Hamiltonian function. By…
The Metropolis algorithm is a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm used to simulate from parameter distributions of interest, such as generalized linear model parameters. The "Metropolis step" is a keystone concept that underlies…
A sampling method for spin systems is presented. The spin lattice is written as the union of a nested sequence of sublattices, all but the last with conditionally independent spins, which are sampled in succession using their marginals. The…
We propose nested sequential Monte Carlo (NSMC), a methodology to sample from sequences of probability distributions, even where the random variables are high-dimensional. NSMC generalises the SMC framework by requiring only approximate,…
In the following article we provide an exposition of exact computational methods to perform parameter inference from partially observed network models. In particular, we consider the duplication attachment (DA) model which has a likelihood…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques are now widely used for cosmological parameter estimation. Chains are generated to sample the posterior probability distribution obtained following the Bayesian approach. An important issue is how…
We consider Markov decision processes (MDPs) in which the transition probabilities and rewards belong to an uncertainty set parametrized by a collection of random variables. The probability distributions for these random parameters are…
Bounding chains are a technique that offers three benefits to Markov chain practitioners: a theoretical bound on the mixing time of the chain under restricted conditions, experimental bounds on the mixing time of the chain that are provably…
Stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms have received much attention in Bayesian computing for big data problems, but they are only applicable to a small class of problems for which the parameter space has a fixed…