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Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have become a cornerstone of many modern scientific analyses by providing a straightforward approach to numerically estimate uncertainties in the parameters of a model using a sequence of random…

Other Statistics · Statistics 2020-03-10 Joshua S. Speagle

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques are now widely used for cosmological parameter estimation. Chains are generated to sample the posterior probability distribution obtained following the Bayesian approach. An important issue is how…

We present a novel approach to quantizing Markov chains. The approach is based on the Markov chain coupling method, which is frequently used to prove fast mixing. Given a particular coupling, e.g., a grand coupling, we construct a…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-12-24 Kristan Temme , Pawel Wocjan

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a sampling-based method for estimating features of probability distributions. MCMC methods produce a serially correlated, yet representative, sample from the desired distribution. As such it can be…

Computation · Statistics 2019-12-10 Dootika Vats , Nathan Robertson , James M Flegal , Galin L Jones

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-06-05 Alexander Terenin , Eric P. Xing

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and Belief Propagation (BP) are the most popular algorithms for computational inference in Graphical Models (GM). In principle, MCMC is an exact probabilistic method which, however, often suffers from…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-05-12 Sungsoo Ahn , Michael Chertkov , Jinwoo Shin

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a powerful tool for sampling from complex probability distributions. Despite its versatility, MCMC often suffers from strong autocorrelation and the negative sign problem, leading to slowing down the…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2024-12-05 Synge Todo

The Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm is a widely recognised as an efficient method for sampling a specified posterior distribution. However, when the posterior is multi-modal, conventional MCMC algorithms either tend to become…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2014-08-19 Yi-Ming Hu , Martin Hendry , Ik Siong Heng

The Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method is used to evaluate the imaginary-time path integral of a quantum oscillator with a potential that includes both a quadratic term and a quartic term whose coupling is varied by several orders of…

Computational Physics · Physics 2020-08-27 Shikhar Mittal , Marise J. E. Westbroek , Peter R. King , Dimitri D. Vvedensky

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a computational approach to fundamental problems such as inference, integration, optimization, and simulation. The field has developed a broad spectrum of algorithms, varying in the way they are motivated,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-01 Kirill Neklyudov , Max Welling , Evgenii Egorov , Dmitry Vetrov

Strongly Rayleigh distributions are natural generalizations of product and determinantal probability distributions and satisfy strongest form of negative dependence properties. We show that the "natural" Monte Carlo Markov Chain (MCMC) is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-03-25 Nima Anari , Shayan Oveis Gharan , Alireza Rezaei

We propose quantum algorithms that provide provable speedups for Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods commonly used for sampling from probability distributions of the form $\pi \propto e^{-f}$, where $f$ is a potential function. Our…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-04-07 Guneykan Ozgul , Xiantao Li , Mehrdad Mahdavi , Chunhao Wang

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are based on the construction of a Markov chain with transition probabilities leaving invariant a probability distribution of interest. In this work, we look at these transition probabilities as…

Probability · Mathematics 2024-10-01 Rocco Caprio , Adam M. Johansen

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is widely regarded as one of the most important algorithms of the 20th century. Its guarantees of asymptotic convergence, stability, and estimator-variance bounds using only unnormalized probability functions…

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…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-04-05 Weiming Feng , Heng Guo , Chunyang Wang , Jiaheng Wang , Yitong Yin

We study the computational complexity of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods for high-dimensional Bayesian linear regression under sparsity constraints. We first show that a Bayesian approach can achieve variable-selection consistency…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-06-01 Yun Yang , Martin J. Wainwright , Michael I. Jordan

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…

Graphics · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Sascha Holl , Gurprit Singh , Hans-Peter Seidel

We discuss a Monte Carlo Markov Chain (MCMC) procedure for the random sampling of some one-dimensional lattice paths with constraints, for various constraints. We show that an approach inspired by optimal transport allows us to bound…

Probability · Mathematics 2010-07-28 Lucas Gerin

Markov chain Monte Calro methods (MCMC) are commonly used in Bayesian statistics. In the last twenty years, many results have been established for the calculation of the exact convergence rate of MCMC methods. We introduce another rate of…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2014-02-17 Kengo Kamatani

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are commonly used for their versatility in sampling from complicated probability distributions. However, as the dimension of the distribution gets larger, the computational costs for a satisfactory…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2020-12-01 Hector J. Hortua , Riccardo Volpi , Dimitri Marinelli , Luigi Malago