Related papers: Target Density Normalization for Markov Chain Mont…

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…

The problem of optimally scaling the proposal distribution in a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm is critical to the quality of the generated samples. Much work has gone into obtaining such results for various Metropolis-Hastings (MH)…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling methods are widely used but often encounter either slow convergence or biased sampling when applied to multimodal high dimensional distributions. In this paper, we present a general framework of…

We introduce a discretization scheme for continuous localized frames using quasi-Monte Carlo integration and discrepancy theory. By generalizing classical concepts, we define a discrepancy measure on the entire phase space $\mathbb{R}^2$…

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…

We construct a new framework for accelerating Markov chain Monte Carlo in posterior sampling problems where standard methods are limited by the computational cost of the likelihood, or of numerical models embedded therein. Our approach…

This paper presents a detailed theoretical analysis of the three stochastic approximation proximal gradient algorithms proposed in our companion paper [49] to set regularization parameters by marginal maximum likelihood estimation. We prove…

Posterior inference for Dirichlet process mixture models is analytically intractable and typically relies on Markov chain Monte Carlo methods, which can become computationally prohibitive at moderate to large sample sizes. In this work, we…

Consider a central problem in randomized approximation schemes that use a Monte Carlo approach. Given a sequence of independent, identically distributed random variables $X_1,X_2,\ldots$ with mean $\mu$ and standard deviation at most $c…

Constraints can be interpreted in a broad sense as any kind of explicit restriction over the parameters. While some constraints are defined directly on the parameter space, when they are instead defined by known behaviour on the model,…

We consider the recently introduced Transformation-based Markov Chain Monte Carlo (TMCMC) (Dutta and Bhattacharya (2014)), a methodology that is designed to update all the parameters simultaneously using some simple deterministic…

Recent advances in MCMC use normalizing flows to precondition target distributions and enable jumps to distant regions. However, there is currently no systematic comparison of different normalizing flow architectures for MCMC. As such, many…

Specialized classifiers, namely those dedicated to a subset of classes, are often adopted in real-world recognition systems. However, integrating such classifiers is nontrivial. Existing methods, e.g. weighted average, usually implicitly…

We introduce a Metropolis-Hastings Markov chain for Boltzmann distributions of classical spin systems. It relies on approximate tensor network contractions to propose correlated collective updates at each step of the evolution. We present…

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…

We prove finite sample complexities for sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithms which require only local mixing times of the associated Markov kernels. Our bounds are particularly useful when the target distribution is multimodal and global…

Estimation in the deformable template model is a big challenge in image analysis. The issue is to estimate an atlas of a population. This atlas contains a template and the corresponding geometrical variability of the observed shapes. The…

Importance sampling is a Monte Carlo method which designs estimators of expectations under a target distribution using weighted samples from a proposal distribution. When the target distribution is complex, such as multimodal distributions…

Markov chains are fundamental models for stochastic dynamics, with applications in a wide range of areas such as population dynamics, queueing systems, reinforcement learning, and Monte Carlo methods. Estimating the transition matrix and…

We present a new framework to derandomise certain Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. As in MCMC, we first reduce counting problems to sampling from a sequence of marginal distributions. For the latter task, we introduce a method…