Related papers: Fast Mixing Markov Chains for Strongly Rayleigh Me…
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…
The switch Markov chain has been extensively studied as the most natural Markov Chain Monte Carlo approach for sampling graphs with prescribed degree sequences. We use comparison arguments with other, less natural but simpler to analyze,…
Sequential Monte Carlo Samplers are a class of stochastic algorithms for Monte Carlo integral estimation w.r.t. probability distributions, which combine elements of Markov chain Monte Carlo methods and importance sampling/resampling…
We extend Monte Carlo samplers based on piecewise deterministic Markov processes (PDMP samplers) by formally defining different boundary conditions such as sticky floors, soft and hard walls and teleportation portals. This allows PDMP…
Restricted Boltzmann Machines are simple and powerful generative models that can encode any complex dataset. Despite all their advantages, in practice the trainings are often unstable and it is difficult to assess their quality because the…
The formal verification of large probabilistic models is important and challenging. Exploiting the concurrency that is often present is one way to address this problem. Here we study a restricted class of asynchronous distributed…
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…
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…
Subset selection problems ask for a small, diverse yet representative subset of the given data. When pairwise similarities are captured by a kernel, the determinants of submatrices provide a measure of diversity or independence of items…
We construct a new framework for accelerating Markov chain Monte Carlo in posterior sampling problems where standard methods are limited by the computational cost of the likelihood, or of numerical models embedded therein. Our approach…
We consider Markov chains which are polynomially mixing, in a weak sense expressed in terms of the space of functions on which the mixing speed is controlled. In this context, we prove polynomial large and moderate deviations inequalities.…
Slow mixing is the central hurdle when working with Markov chains, especially those used for Monte Carlo approximations (MCMC). In many applications, it is only of interest to estimate the stationary expectations of a small set of…
The problem of efficiently sampling from a set of (undirected, or directed) 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…
The Nystr\"om method has long been popular for scaling up kernel methods. Its theoretical guarantees and empirical performance rely critically on the quality of the landmarks selected. We study landmark selection for Nystr\"om using…
Determinantal Point Processes (DPPs) are a family of probabilistic models that have a repulsive behavior, and lend themselves naturally to many tasks in machine learning where returning a diverse set of objects is important. While there are…
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…
Cyclical MCMC is a novel MCMC framework recently proposed by Zhang et al. (2019) to address the challenge posed by high-dimensional multimodal posterior distributions like those arising in deep learning. The algorithm works by generating a…
We present a selective sampling method designed to accelerate the training of deep neural networks. To this end, we introduce a novel measurement, the minimal margin score (MMS), which measures the minimal amount of displacement an input…
Sampling from multivariate normal distributions, subjected to a variety of restrictions, is a problem that is recurrent in statistics and computing. In the present work, we demonstrate a general framework to efficiently sample a…
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…