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

We use recent results on algorithms for Markov decision problems to show that a canonical form for a generalized P-matrix can be computed, in some important cases, by a strongly polynomial algorithm.

Recent advances in stochastic gradient variational inference have made it possible to perform variational Bayesian inference with posterior approximations containing auxiliary random variables. This enables us to explore a new synthesis of…

Ge and Stefankovic have recently introduced a novel two-variable graph polynomial. When specialised to a bipartite graphs G and evaluated at the point (1/2,1) this polynomial gives the number of independent sets in the graph. Inspired by…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods provide consistent of integrals as the number of iterations goes to infinity. MCMC estimators are generally biased after any fixed number of iterations. We propose to remove this bias by using…

Multicanonical MCMC (Multicanonical Markov Chain Monte Carlo; Multicanonical Monte Carlo) is discussed as a method of rare event sampling. Starting from a review of the generic framework of importance sampling, multicanonical MCMC is…

Path integral quantum Monte Carlo (PIMC) is a method for estimating thermal equilibrium properties of stoquastic quantum spin systems by sampling from a classical Gibbs distribution using Markov chain Monte Carlo. The PIMC method has been…

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 the engine of modern Bayesian statistics, being used to approximate the posterior and derived quantities of interest. Despite this, the issue of how the output from a Markov chain is post-processed and…

Due to the escalating growth of big data sets in recent years, new Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) parallel computing methods have been developed. These methods partition large data sets by observations into subsets. However, for…

We propose a new Markov chain Monte Carlo method in which trial configurations are generated by evolving a state, sampled from a prior distribution, using a Markov transition matrix. We present two prototypical algorithms and derive their…

Bayesian modelling and computational inference by Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a principled framework for large-scale uncertainty quantification, though is limited in practice by computational cost when implemented in the simplest…

In parameter estimation problems one computes a posterior distribution over uncertain parameters defined jointly by a prior distribution, a model, and noisy data. Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is often used for the numerical solution of…

In this work, we developed an efficient approach to compute ensemble averages in systems with pairwise-additive energetic interactions between the entities. Methods involving full enumeration of the configuration space result in exponential…

Posterior sampling is a task of central importance in Bayesian inference. For many applications in Bayesian meta-analysis and Bayesian transfer learning, the prior distribution is unknown and needs to be estimated from samples. In practice,…

Use each of n exact samples as the initial state for a MCMC sampler run for m steps. We give confidence intervals for accuracy of estimators which are always valid and which, in certain settings, are almost as good as the intervals one…

A new Monte Carlo algorithm for phase-space sampling, named (MC)**3, is presented. It is based on Markov Chain Monte Carlo techniques but at the same time incorporates prior knowledge about the target distribution in the form of suitable…

Monte Carlo methods use random sampling to estimate numerical quantities which are hard to compute deterministically. One important example is the use in statistical physics of rapidly mixing Markov chains to approximately compute partition…

We present an efficient algorithm for the inference of stochastic block models in large networks. The algorithm can be used as an optimized Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method, with a fast mixing time and a much reduced susceptibility to…

Global fits of physics models require efficient methods for exploring high-dimensional and/or multimodal posterior functions. We introduce a novel method for accelerating Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling by pairing a…

Evaluating the degree of partisan districting (Gerrymandering) in a statistical framework typically requires an ensemble of districting plans which are drawn from a prescribed probability distribution that adheres to a realistic and…