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Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods are widely used to draw samples from intractable target distributions. Particle degeneracy can hinder the use of SMC when the target distribution is highly constrained or multimodal. As a motivating…

We propose nested sequential Monte Carlo (NSMC), a methodology to sample from sequences of probability distributions, even where the random variables are high-dimensional. NSMC generalises the SMC framework by requiring only approximate,…

We present an approach to interface branching random walks with Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling, and to switch seamlessly between the two. The approach is discussed in the context of auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (AFQMC) but is…

The problem of optimising functions with intractable gradients frequently arise in machine learning and statistics, ranging from maximum marginal likelihood estimation procedures to fine-tuning of generative models. Stochastic approximation…

This paper develops a novel sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) approach for joint state and parameter estimation that can deal efficiently with abruptly changing parameters which is a common case when tracking maneuvering targets. The approach…

Bayesian inference for models that have an intractable partition function is known as a doubly intractable problem, where standard Monte Carlo methods are not applicable. The past decade has seen the development of auxiliary variable Monte…

We demonstrate the use of a variational method to determine a quantitative lower bound on the rate of convergence of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms as a function of the target density and proposal density. The bound relies on…

This paper concerns the use of sequential Monte Carlo methods (SMC) for smoothing in general state space models. A well-known problem when applying the standard SMC technique in the smoothing mode is that the resampling mechanism introduces…

In the following paper we provide a review and development of sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods for option pricing. SMC are a class of Monte Carlo-based algorithms, that are designed to approximate expectations w.r.t a sequence of…

Recent advances in machine learning have led to the development of new methods for enhancing Monte Carlo methods such as Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and importance sampling (IS). One such method is normalizing flows, which use a neural…

Statisticians often use Monte Carlo methods to approximate probability distributions, primarily with Markov chain Monte Carlo and importance sampling. Sequential Monte Carlo samplers are a class of algorithms that combine both techniques to…

This paper studies a non-random-walk Markov Chain Monte Carlo method, namely the Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) method in the context of Subset Simulation used for structural reliability analysis. The HMC method relies on a deterministic…

Pricing options is an important problem in financial engineering. In many scenarios of practical interest, financial option prices associated to an underlying asset reduces to computing an expectation w.r.t.~a diffusion process. In general,…

In this paper, we provide bounds on the asymptotic variance for a class of sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) samplers designed for approximating multimodal distributions. Such methods combine standard SMC methods and Markov chain Monte Carlo…

Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) samplers are powerful tools for Bayesian inference but suffer from high computational costs due to their reliance on large particle ensembles for accurate estimates. We introduce persistent sampling (PS), an…

Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods comprise one of the most successful approaches to approximate Bayesian filtering. However, SMC without good proposal distributions struggle in high dimensions. We propose nested sequential Monte Carlo…

Many machine learning problems involve Monte Carlo gradient estimators. As a prominent example, we focus on Monte Carlo variational inference (MCVI) in this paper. The performance of MCVI crucially depends on the variance of its stochastic…

Importance sampling (IS) is commonly used for cross validation (CV) in Bayesian models, because it only involves reweighting existing posterior draws without needing to re-estimate the model by re-running Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC).…

In many real-world engineering systems, the performance or reliability of the system is characterised by a scalar parameter. The distribution of this performance parameter is important in many uncertainty quantification problems, ranging…

Seismic tomography is a methodology to image the interior of solid or fluid media, and is often used to map properties in the subsurface of the Earth. In order to better interpret the resulting images it is important to assess imaging…