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Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a powerful Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method for performing approximate inference in complex probabilistic models of continuous variables. In common with many MCMC methods, however, the standard HMC…
Discrete data are abundant and often arise as counts or rounded data. These data commonly exhibit complex distributional features such as zero-inflation, over-/under-dispersion, boundedness, and heaping, which render many parametric models…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are widely used in machine learning. One of the major problems with MCMC is the question of how to design chains that mix fast over the whole state space; in particular, how to select the parameters…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are employed to sample from a given distribution of interest, whenever either the distribution does not exist in closed form, or, if it does, no efficient method to simulate an independent sample from…
We describe an MCMC method for sampling distributions with soft constraints, which are constraints that are almost but not exactly satisfied. We sample a total distribution that is a convex combination of the target soft distribution with…
This paper concerns the use of sequential Monte Carlo methods (SMC) for smoothing in general state space models. A well-known problem when applying the standard SMC technique in the smoothing mode is that the resampling mechanism introduces…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulations are modeled as driven by true random numbers. We consider variance bounding Markov chains driven by a deterministic sequence of numbers. The star-discrepancy provides a measure of efficiency of…
We analyse a multilevel Monte Carlo method for the approximation of distribution functions of univariate random variables. Since, by assumption, the target distribution is not known explicitly, approximations have to be used. We provide an…
Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods comprise one of the most successful approaches to approximate Bayesian filtering. However, SMC without good proposal distributions struggle in high dimensions. We propose nested sequential Monte Carlo…
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…
We describe and analyze a variance reduction approach for Monte Carlo (MC) sampling that accelerates the estimation of statistics of computationally expensive simulation models using an ensemble of models with lower cost. These lower cost…
We propose a new Monte Carlo method for sampling from multimodal distributions. The idea of this technique is based on splitting the task into two: finding the modes of a target distribution $\pi$ and sampling, given the knowledge of the…
We consider the problem of computing an approximation to the integral $I=\int_{[0,1]^d}f(x) dx$. Monte Carlo (MC) sampling typically attains a root mean squared error (RMSE) of $O(n^{-1/2})$ from $n$ independent random function evaluations.…
We demonstrate the use of a variational method to determine a quantitative lower bound on the rate of convergence of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms as a function of the target density and proposal density. The bound relies on…
We consider parallel asynchronous Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling for problems where we can leverage (stochastic) gradients to define continuous dynamics which explore the target distribution. We outline a solution strategy for…
We propose a multilevel Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method for the Bayesian inference of random field parameters in PDEs using high-resolution data. Compared to existing multilevel MCMC methods, we additionally consider level-dependent…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) produces a correlated sample for estimating expectations with respect to a target distribution. A fundamental question is when should sampling stop so that we have good estimates of the desired quantities?…
We present a sequential Monte Carlo sampler algorithm for the Bayesian analysis of generalised linear mixed models (GLMMs). These models support a variety of interesting regression-type analyses, but performing inference is often extremely…
We develop diffusion-based samplers for target distributions known up to a normalising constant. To this end, we rely on the well-known diffusion path that smoothly interpolates between a simple base distribution and the target, popularised…
Approximate inference in probabilistic graphical models (PGMs) can be grouped into deterministic methods and Monte-Carlo-based methods. The former can often provide accurate and rapid inferences, but are typically associated with biases…