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Multi-fidelity Monte Carlo (MFMC) is a variance reduction method that leverages a multi-fidelity ensemble of models of varying cost and accuracy levels. Constructing an MFMC estimator with optimal variance requires knowledge of the…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-25 Michael Stanley , Thomas Coons , Geoffrey Bomarito , Patrick Leser , Joshua Pribe , James Warner

Monte Carlo estimation in plays a crucial role in stochastic reaction networks. However, reducing the statistical uncertainty of the corresponding estimators requires sampling a large number of trajectories. We propose control variates…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-10-19 Michael Backenköhler , Luca Bortolussi , Verena Wolf

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

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…

Computation · Statistics 2021-05-04 Alex A. Gorodetsky , Gianluca Geraci , Mike Eldred , John D. Jakeman

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a powerful Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm for estimating expectations with respect to continuous un-normalized probability distributions. MCMC estimators typically have higher variance than…

Computation · Statistics 2020-03-04 Dan Piponi , Matthew D. Hoffman , Pavel Sountsov

Variational inference lies at the core of many state-of-the-art algorithms. To improve the approximation of the posterior beyond parametric families, it was proposed to include MCMC steps into the variational lower bound. In this work we…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-09-28 Christopher Wolf , Maximilian Karl , Patrick van der Smagt

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling is an important and commonly used tool for the analysis of hierarchical models. Nevertheless, practitioners generally have two options for MCMC: utilize existing software that generates a black-box…

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-09-07 Leah F. South , Marina Riabiz , Onur Teymur , Chris. J. Oates

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…

Computation · Statistics 2015-05-20 Tim Salimans , Diederik P. Kingma , Max Welling

We propose a generic Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm to speed up computations for datasets with many observations. A key feature of our approach is the use of the highly efficient difference estimator from the survey sampling…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-08-03 Matias Quiroz , Mattias Villani , Robert Kohn

Approximate Bayesian inference for models with computationally expensive, black-box likelihoods poses a significant challenge, especially when the posterior distribution is complex. Many inference methods struggle to explore the parameter…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-11 Francesco Silvestrin , Chengkun Li , Luigi Acerbi

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…

Computation · Statistics 2020-09-21 Colin Fox , Tiangang Cui , Markus Neumayer

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods for sampling probability density functions (combined with abundant computational resources) have transformed the sciences, especially in performing probabilistic inferences, or fitting models to data.…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2018-05-23 David W. Hogg , Daniel Foreman-Mackey

The Self-Learning Monte Carlo (SLMC) method is a Monte Carlo approach that has emerged in recent years by integrating concepts from machine learning with conventional Monte Carlo techniques. Designed to accelerate the numerical study of…

Strongly Correlated Electrons · Physics 2025-07-18 Gaopei Pan , Chuang Chen , Zi Yang Meng

Many problems in the physical sciences, machine learning, and statistical inference necessitate sampling from a high-dimensional, multi-modal probability distribution. Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms, the ubiquitous tool for this…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2022-05-12 Marylou Gabrié , Grant M. Rotskoff , Eric Vanden-Eijnden

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are ubiquitous tools for simulation-based inference in many fields but designing and identifying good MCMC samplers is still an open question. This paper introduces a novel MCMC algorithm, namely,…

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…

Computation · Statistics 2019-07-17 Christopher Nemeth , Paul Fearnhead

In many problems, complex non-Gaussian and/or nonlinear models are required to accurately describe a physical system of interest. In such cases, Monte Carlo algorithms are remarkably flexible and extremely powerful approaches to solve such…

Computation · Statistics 2015-04-23 Thi Le Thu Nguyen , Francois Septier , Gareth W. Peters , Yves Delignon

Recent advances in stochastic gradient techniques have made it possible to estimate posterior distributions from large datasets via Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). However, when the target posterior is multimodal, mixing performance is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-01-12 Yizhe Zhang , Changyou Chen , Zhe Gan , Ricardo Henao , Lawrence Carin

Exact approximations of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are a general emerging class of sampling algorithms. One of the main ideas behind exact approximations consists of replacing intractable quantities required to run standard…

Computation · Statistics 2015-10-30 Christophe Andrieu , Matti Vihola