Related papers: Comparison of hit-and-run, slice sampling and rand…

Markov chain sampling methods that automatically adapt to characteristics of the distribution being sampled can be constructed by exploiting the principle that one can sample from a distribution by sampling uniformly from the region under…

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…

In this paper we introduce a new sampling algorithm which has the potential to be adopted as a universal replacement to the Metropolis--Hastings algorithm. It is related to the slice sampler, and motivated by an algorithm which is…

Hit-and-Run is known to be one of the best random sampling algorithms, its mixing time is polynomial in dimension. Nevertheless, in practice the number of steps required to achieve uniformly distributed samples is rather high. We propose…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling of densities restricted to linearly constrained domains is an important task arising in Bayesian treatment of inverse problems in the natural sciences. While efficient algorithms for uniform polytope…

Various Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are studied to improve upon random walk Metropolis sampling, for simulation from complex distributions. Examples include Metropolis-adjusted Langevin algorithms, Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, and…

We propose a new framework for efficiently sampling from complex probability distributions using a combination of normalizing flows and elliptical slice sampling (Murray et al., 2010). The central idea is to learn a diffeomorphism, through…

Bayesian inference with nested sampling requires a likelihood-restricted prior sampling method, which draws samples from the prior distribution that exceed a likelihood threshold. For high-dimensional problems, Markov Chain Monte Carlo…

I show how Markov chain sampling with the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm can be modified so as to take bigger steps when the distribution being sampled from has the characteristic that its density can be quickly recomputed for a new point if…

In engineering examples, one often encounters the need to sample from unnormalized distributions with complex shapes that may also be implicitly defined through a physical or numerical simulation model, making it computationally expensive…

One of the most widely used samplers in practice is the component-wise Metropolis-Hastings (CMH) sampler that updates in turn the components of a vector valued Markov chain using accept-reject moves generated from a proposal distribution.…

Using the framework of weak Poincar\'e inequalities, we provide a general comparison between Hybrid and Ideal Slice Sampling in terms of their corresponding Dirichlet forms. In particular, under suitable assumptions Hybrid Slice Sampling…

An algorithm for sampling from non-log-concave multivariate distributions is proposed, which improves the adaptive rejection Metropolis sampling (ARMS) algorithm by incorporating the hit and run sampling. It is not rare that the ARMS is…

The Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithm is one of the most widely used Markov Chain Monte Carlo schemes for generating samples from Bayesian posterior distributions. The algorithm is asymptotically exact, flexible and easy to implement.…

MCMC methods (Monte Carlo Markov Chain) are a class of methods used to perform simulations per a probability distribution $P$. These methods are often used when we have difficulties to directly sample per a given probability distribution…

Polar slice sampling (Roberts & Rosenthal, 2002) is a Markov chain approach for approximate sampling of distributions that is difficult, if not impossible, to implement efficiently, but behaves provably well with respect to the dimension.…

We present a comprehensive comparison of different Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling methods, evaluating their performance on both standard test problems and cosmological parameter estimation. Our analysis includes traditional…

We propose an adaptive Metropolis-Hastings algorithm in which sampled data are used to update the proposal distribution. We use the samples found by the algorithm at a particular step to form the information-theoretically optimal mean-field…

Slice Sampling has emerged as a powerful Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm that adapts to the characteristics of the target distribution with minimal hand-tuning. However, Slice Sampling's performance is highly sensitive to the…

Among random sampling methods, Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms are foremost. Using a combination of analytical and numerical approaches, we study their convergence properties towards the steady state, within a random walk Metropolis…