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Modern computational advances have enabled easy parallel implementations of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). However, almost all work in estimating the variance of Monte Carlo averages, including the efficient batch means (BM) estimator,…

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.…

We describe a general strategy for sampling configurations from a given distribution, NOT based on the standard Metropolis (Markov chain) strategy. It uses the fact that nontrivial problems in statistical physics are high dimensional and…

Delayed-acceptance Markov chain Monte Carlo (DA-MCMC) samples from a probability distribution via a two-stages version of the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm, by combining the target distribution with a "surrogate" (i.e. an approximate and…

I show how Markov chain sampling with the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm can be modified so as to take bigger steps when the distribution being sampled from has the characteristic that its density can be quickly recomputed for a new point if…

Performing exact Bayesian inference for complex models is computationally intractable. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms can provide reliable approximations of the posterior distribution but are expensive for large datasets and…

Using Markov chain Monte Carlo to sample from posterior distributions was the key innovation which made Bayesian data analysis practical. Notoriously, however, MCMC is hard to tune, hard to diagnose, and hard to parallelize. This…

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…

Sampling from a lattice Gaussian distribution is emerging as an important problem in various areas such as coding and cryptography. The default sampling algorithm --- Klein's algorithm yields a distribution close to the lattice Gaussian…

We study the integration of functions with respect to an unknown density. We compare the simple Monte Carlo method (which is almost optimal for a certain large class of inputs) and compare it with the Metropolis algorithm (based on a…

High-dimensional distributions, especially those with heavy tails, are notoriously difficult for off-the-shelf MCMC samplers: the combination of unbounded state spaces, diminishing gradient information, and local moves results in…

Monte Carlo methods, such as Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), remain the most regularly-used approach for implementing Bayesian inference. However, the computational cost of these approaches usually scales worse than linearly with the…

There is a tension between robustness and efficiency when designing Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling algorithms. Here we focus on robustness with respect to tuning parameters, showing that more sophisticated algorithms tend to be…

The celebrated Monte Carlo method estimates an expensive-to-compute quantity by random sampling. Bandit-based Monte Carlo optimization is a general technique for computing the minimum of many such expensive-to-compute quantities by adaptive…

Bayesian inference allows us to define a posterior distribution over the weights of a generic neural network (NN). Exact posteriors are usually intractable, in which case approximations can be employed. One such approximation - variational…

Markov jump processes (MJPs) are continuous-time stochastic processes widely used in a variety of applied disciplines. Inference for MJPs typically proceeds via Markov chain Monte Carlo, the state-of-the-art being a uniformization-based…

In this paper we study asymptotic properties of different data-augmentation-type Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms sampling from mixture models comprising discrete as well as continuous random variables. Of particular interest to us is…

We introduce the Markov Stochastic Block Model (MSBM): a growth model for community based networks where node attributes are assigned through a Markovian dynamic. We rely on HMMs' literature to design prediction methods that are robust to…

Monte Carlo sampling of the canonical distribution presents a formidable challenge when the potential energy landscape is characterized by a large number of local minima separated by high barriers. The principal observation of this work is…

Component-wise MCMC algorithms, including Gibbs and conditional Metropolis-Hastings samplers, are commonly used for sampling from multivariate probability distributions. A long-standing question regarding Gibbs algorithms is whether a…