Related papers: Canonical Paths for MCMC: from Art to Science

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are essential tools in computational statistics for sampling from unnormalised probability distributions, but can be fragile when targeting high-dimensional, multimodal, or complex target…

Markov chains are one of the well-known tools for modeling and analyzing stochastic systems. At the same time, they are used for constructing random walks that can achieve a given stationary distribution. This paper is concerned with…

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…

Bayesian inference for doubly-intractable pairwise exponential graphical models typically involves variations of the exchange algorithm or approximate Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) samplers. However, existing methods for both classes of…

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…

Markov chain Monte Carlo methods are a powerful tool for sampling equilibrium configurations in complex systems. One problem these methods often face is slow convergence over large energy barriers. In this work, we propose a novel method…

The problem of efficiently sampling from a set of(undirected) graphs with a given degree sequence has many applications. One approach to this problem uses a simple Markov chain, which we call the switch chain, to perform the sampling. The…

Brute force cross-validation (CV) is a method for predictive assessment and model selection that is general and applicable to a wide range of Bayesian models. Naive or `brute force' CV approaches are often too computationally costly for…

We propose a novel Metropolis-Hastings algorithm to sample uniformly from the space of correlation matrices. Existing methods in the literature are based on elaborated representations of a correlation matrix, or on complex parametrizations…

When implementing Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms, perturbation caused by numerical errors is sometimes inevitable. This paper studies how perturbation of MCMC affects the convergence speed and Monte Carlo estimation accuracy.…

Convergence diagnosis for Markov chain Monte Carlo is a matter of fundamental importance in computational statistics: it determines the resources allocated to a particular sampling problem and influences the practitioner's view of the…

The six-vertex model is an important model in statistical physics and has deep connections with counting problems. There have been some fully polynomial randomized approximation schemes (FPRAS) for the six-vertex model [30, 10], which all…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a popular and successful general-purpose tool for Bayesian inference. However, MCMC cannot be practically applied to large data sets because of the prohibitive cost of evaluating every likelihood term at…

Sampling from Gibbs distribution is a central problem in computer science as well as in statistical physics. In this work we focus on the k-colouring model} and the hard-core model with fugacity \lambda when the underlying graph is an…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are generally regarded as the gold standard technique for Bayesian inference. They are theoretically well-understood and conceptually simple to apply in practice. The drawback of MCMC is that in…

Standard Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) admits three fundamental control parameters: the number of chains, the length of the warmup phase, and the length of the sampling phase. These control parameters play a large role in determining the…

Communication costs, resulting from synchronization requirements during learning, can greatly slow down many parallel machine learning algorithms. In this paper, we present a parallel Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm in which…

Any search or sampling algorithm for solution of inverse problems needs guidance to be efficient. Many algorithms collect and apply information about the problem on the fly, and much improvement has been made in this way. However, as a…

This paper introduces a concept of approximate spectral gap to analyze the mixing time of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms for which the usual spectral gap is degenerate or almost degenerate. We use the idea to analyze a class of…

Counting perfect matchings has played a central role in the theory of counting problems. The permanent, corresponding to bipartite graphs, was shown to be #P-complete to compute exactly by Valiant (1979), and a fully polynomial randomized…