English
Related papers

Related papers: Measuring the non-asymptotic convergence of sequen…

200 papers

This paper addresses the problem of Monte Carlo approximation of posterior probability distributions. In particular, we have considered a recently proposed technique known as population Monte Carlo (PMC), which is based on an iterative…

Computation · Statistics 2016-06-03 Eugenia Koblents , Joaquín Míguez

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…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2008-03-06 Jimmy Olsson , Olivier Cappé , Randal Douc , Eric Moulines

Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithms were originally designed for estimating intractable conditional expectations within state-space models, but are now routinely used to generate approximate samples in the context of general-purpose…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-05-11 Jonathan H. Huggins , Daniel M. Roy

We investigate the stability of a Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) method applied to the problem of sampling from a target distribution on $\mathbb{R}^d$ for large $d$. It is well known that using a single importance sampling step one produces…

Computation · Statistics 2012-04-19 Alexandros Beskos , Dan Crisan , Ajay Jasra

We propose a new framework for how to use sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithms for inference in probabilistic graphical models (PGM). Via a sequential decomposition of the PGM we find a sequence of auxiliary distributions defined on a…

Methodology · Statistics 2014-10-07 Christian A. Naesseth , Fredrik Lindsten , Thomas B. Schön

We prove a bound on the finite sample error of sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) on static spaces using the $L_2$ distance between interpolating distributions and the mixing times of Markov kernels. This result is unique in that it is the first…

Computation · Statistics 2025-08-26 Joe Marion , Joseph Mathews , Scott C. Schmidler

In this article we develop a new sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) method for multilevel (ML) Monte Carlo estimation. In particular, the method can be used to estimate expectations with respect to a target probability distribution over an…

Computation · Statistics 2017-03-16 Alexandros Beskos , Ajay Jasra , Kody Law , Youssef Marzouk , Yan Zhou

The term ``sequential Monte Carlo methods'' or, equivalently, ``particle filters,'' refers to a general class of iterative algorithms that performs Monte Carlo approximations of a given sequence of distributions of interest (\pi_t). We…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2007-06-13 Nicolas Chopin

Statistical inference in evolutionary models with site-dependence is a long-standing challenge in phylogenetics and computational biology. We consider the problem of approximating marginal sequence likelihoods under dependent-site models of…

Computation · Statistics 2025-11-12 Joseph Mathews , Scott C. Schmidler

This paper introduces a new technique for quantifying the approximation error of a broad class of probabilistic inference programs, including ones based on both variational and Monte Carlo approaches. The key idea is to derive a subjective…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-06-02 Marco F Cusumano-Towner , Vikash K Mansinghka

Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) is a class of algorithms that approximate high-dimensional expectations of a Markov chain. SMC algorithms typically include a resampling step. There are many possible ways to resample, but the relative…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2019-04-01 Robert J. Webber

We propose a sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) method to efficiently and accurately compute cut-Bayesian posterior quantities of interest, variations of standard Bayesian approaches constructed primarily to account for model misspecification. We…

Computation · Statistics 2024-11-13 Joseph Mathews , Giri Gopalan , James Gattiker , Sean Smith , Devin Francom

Constraints can be interpreted in a broad sense as any kind of explicit restriction over the parameters. While some constraints are defined directly on the parameter space, when they are instead defined by known behaviour on the model,…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-02-27 Shirin Golchi , David A. Campbell

Inference-time methods that aggregate and prune multiple samples have emerged as a powerful paradigm for steering large language models, yet we lack any principled understanding of their accuracy-cost tradeoffs. In this paper, we introduce…

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…

Computation · Statistics 2017-10-13 Richard G. Everitt , Dennis Prangle , Philip Maybank , Mark Bell

Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods, also known as particle filters, constitute a class of algorithms used to approximate expectations with respect to a sequence of probability distributions as well as the normalising constants of those…

Computation · Statistics 2026-01-14 Axel Finke , Arnaud Doucet , Adam M. Johansen

Approximate inference in probabilistic graphical models (PGMs) can be grouped into deterministic methods and Monte-Carlo-based methods. The former can often provide accurate and rapid inferences, but are typically associated with biases…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-01-09 Fredrik Lindsten , Jouni Helske , Matti Vihola

Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods, also known as particle filters, are simulation-based recursive algorithms for the approximation of the a posteriori probability measures generated by state-space dynamical models. At any given time $t$,…

Computation · Statistics 2016-11-24 Dan Crisan , Joaquín Míguez

In this article we consider the approximation of expectations w.r.t. probability distributions associated to the solution of partial differential equations (PDEs); this scenario appears routinely in Bayesian inverse problems. In practice,…

Computation · Statistics 2017-02-07 Alexandros Beskos , Ajay Jasra , Kody Law , Raul Tempone , Yan Zhou

We present a sequential Monte Carlo sampler variant of the partial rejection control algorithm, and show that this variant can be considered as a sequential Monte Carlo sampler with a modified mutation kernel. We prove that the new sampler…

Computation · Statistics 2009-11-11 G. W. Peters , Y. Fan , S. A. Sisson