Related papers: Parallel Metropolis chains with cooperative adapta…
Tasks such as record linkage and multi-target tracking, which involve reconstructing the set of objects that underlie some observed data, are particularly challenging for probabilistic inference. Recent work has achieved efficient and…
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…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are routinely used to draw samples from distributions with intractable normalization constants. However, standard MCMC algorithms do not apply to doubly-intractable distributions in which there are…
The design of the proposal distributions, and most notably the kernel parameters, are crucial for the performance of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) rendering. A poor selection of parameters can increase the correlation of the Markov chain…
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.…
Motivated by the physics of strings and branes, we develop a class of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms involving extended objects. Starting from a collection of parallel Metropolis-Hastings (MH) samplers, we place them on an…
We develop an Evolutionary Markov Chain Monte Carlo (EMCMC) algorithm for sampling spatial partitions that lie within a large and complex spatial state space. Our algorithm combines the advantages of evolutionary algorithms (EAs) as…
Couplings play a central role in contemporary Markov chain Monte Carlo methods and in the analysis of their convergence to stationarity. In most cases, a coupling must induce relatively fast meeting between chains to ensure good…
Despite the enormous success of Hamiltonian Monte Carlo and related Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, sampling often still represents the computational bottleneck in scientific applications. Availability of parallel resources can…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a well-established family of algorithms which are primarily used in Bayesian statistics to sample from a target distribution when direct sampling is challenging. Single instances of MCMC methods are widely…
Adaptive Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms, which automatically tune their parameters based on past samples, have proved extremely useful in practice. The self-tuning mechanism makes them `non-Markovian', which means that their…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods such as Gibbs sampling are finding widespread use in applied statistics and machine learning. These often lead to difficult computational problems, which are increasingly being solved on parallel and…
It is commonly admitted that non-reversible Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms usually yield more accurate MCMC estimators than their reversible counterparts. In this note, we show that in addition to their variance reduction…
We show that for any multiple-try Metropolis algorithm, one can always accept the proposal and evaluate the importance weight that is needed to correct for the bias without extra computational cost. This results in a general, convenient,…
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…
Many problems in the physical sciences, machine learning, and statistical inference necessitate sampling from a high-dimensional, multi-modal probability distribution. Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms, the ubiquitous tool for this…
We present a Metropolis-Hastings Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm for detecting hidden variables in a continuous time Bayesian network (CTBN), which uses reversible jumps in the sense defined by (Green 1995). In common with several…
Monte Carlo (MC) methods for numerical integration seem to be embarassingly parallel on first sight. When adaptive schemes are applied in order to enhance convergence however, the seemingly most natural way of replicating the whole job on…
Accept-reject based Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are the workhorse algorithm for Bayesian inference. These algorithms, like Metropolis-Hastings, require choosing a proposal distribution which is typically informed by the desired…
Parallel tempering is a generic Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling method which allows good mixing with multimodal target distributions, where conventional Metropolis-Hastings algorithms often fail. The mixing properties of the sampler…