Related papers: On the Pitfalls of Nested Monte Carlo
This paper considers a new approach to using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) in contexts where one may adopt multilevel (ML) Monte Carlo. The underlying problem is to approximate expectations w.r.t. an underlying probability measure that is…
Statistical inference methods are fundamentally important in machine learning. Most state-of-the-art inference algorithms are variants of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) or variational inference (VI). However, both methods struggle with…
When simulating a complex stochastic system, the behavior of output response depends on input parameters estimated from finite real-world data, and the finiteness of data brings input uncertainty into the system. The quantification of the…
We consider a problem of model selection in high-dimensional binary Markov random fields. The usefulness of the Ising model in studying systems of complex interactions has been confirmed in many papers. The main drawback of this model is…
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…
When dealing with difficult inverse problems such as inverse rendering, using Monte Carlo estimated gradients to optimise parameters can slow down convergence due to variance. Averaging many gradient samples in each iteration reduces this…
In this paper we will give a Monte Carlo algorithm by which the moments of a functions of Dirichlet probability distributions can be estimated. This algorithm is called Inner Nested Sampling and is an implementation of Skilling's general…
We propose a novel sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) method for sampling from unnormalized target distributions based on a reverse denoising diffusion process. While recent diffusion-based samplers simulate the reverse diffusion using…
We analyze the accuracy and sample complexity of variational Monte Carlo approaches to simulate the dynamics of many-body quantum systems classically. By systematically studying the relevant stochastic estimators, we are able to: (i) prove…
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…
Multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) and unbiased estimators recently proposed by McLeish (Monte Carlo Methods Appl., 2011) and Rhee and Glynn (Oper. Res., 2015) are closely related. This connection is elaborated by presenting a new general class…
This work investigates the challenge of ensuring safety guarantees in the presence of uncontrollable agents, whose behaviors are stochastic and depend on both their own and the system's states. We present a neural model predictive control…
Monte Carlo algorithms are a foundational pillar of modern computational science, yet their effective application hinges on a deep understanding of their performance trade offs. This paper presents a critical analysis of the evolution of…
The order of convergence of the Monte Carlo method is 1/2 which means that we need quadruple samples to decrease the error in half in the numerical simulation. Multilevel Monte Carlo methods reach the same order of error by spending less…
There is a growing interest in the literature for adaptive Markov chain Monte Carlo methods based on sequences of random transition kernels $\{P_n\}$ where the kernel $P_n$ is allowed to have an invariant distribution $\pi_n$ not…
The Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are popular when considering sampling from a high-dimensional random variable $\mathbf{x}$ with possibly unnormalised probability density $p$ and observed data $\mathbf{d}$. However, MCMC requires…
In Bayesian inference, predictive distributions are typically in the form of samples generated via Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) or related algorithms. In this paper, we conduct a systematic analysis of how to make and evaluate…
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…
Adaptive and interacting Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms (MCMC) have been recently introduced in the literature. These novel simulation algorithms are designed to increase the simulation efficiency to sample complex distributions.…
Multifidelity Monte Carlo methods rely on a hierarchy of possibly less accurate but statistically correlated simplified or reduced models, in order to accelerate the estimation of statistics of high-fidelity models without compromising the…