Related papers: Exponential Ergodicity of the Bouncy Particle Samp…

We make two closely related theoretical contributions to the use of importance sampling schemes. First, for independent sampling, we prove that the minimax optimal trial distribution coincides with the target if and only if the target…

The Bouncy Particle sampler (BPS) and the Zig-Zag sampler (ZZS) are continuous time, non-reversible Monte Carlo methods based on piecewise deterministic Markov processes. Experiments show that the speed of convergence of these samplers can…

Ergodic exploration has spawned a lot of interest in mobile robotics due to its ability to design time trajectories that match desired spatial coverage statistics. However, current ergodic approaches are for continuous spaces, which require…

There has been substantial interest in developing Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms based on piecewise-deterministic Markov processes. However existing algorithms can only be used if the target distribution of interest is differentiable…

Rao and Teh (2012, 2013) introduced an efficient MCMC algorithm for sampling from the posterior distribution of a hidden Markov jump process. The algorithm is based on the idea of sampling virtual jumps. In the present paper we show that…

In the framework of statistical mechanics the properties of macroscopic systems are deduced starting from the laws of their microscopic dynamics. One of the key assumptions in this procedure is the ergodic property, namely the equivalence…

We develop a novel Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method that exploits a hierarchy of models of increasing complexity to efficiently generate samples from an unnormalized target distribution. Broadly, the method rewrites the Multilevel…

This paper discusses the irreducibility and geometric ergodicity of the Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) algorithm. We consider cases where the number of steps of the symplectic integrator is either fixed or random. Under mild conditions on…

Gaussian mixtures are commonly used for modeling heavy-tailed error distributions in robust linear regression. Combining the likelihood of a multivariate robust linear regression model with a standard improper prior distribution yields an…

We study convergence properties of pseudo-marginal Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms (Andrieu and Roberts [Ann. Statist. 37 (2009) 697-725]). We find that the asymptotic variance of the pseudo-marginal algorithm is always at least as…

We consider Gibbs samplers for a normal linear regression model with a global-local shrinkage prior and show that they produce geometrically ergodic Markov chains. First, under the horseshoe local prior and a three-parameter beta global…

Estimation in the deformable template model is a big challenge in image analysis. The issue is to estimate an atlas of a population. This atlas contains a template and the corresponding geometrical variability of the observed shapes. The…

Probability measures on the sphere form an important class of statistical models and are used, for example, in modeling directional data or shapes. Due to their widespread use, but also as an algorithmic building block, efficient sampling…

Bayesian inference is useful to obtain a predictive distribution with a small generalization error. However, since posterior distributions are rarely evaluated analytically, we employ the variational Bayesian inference or sampling method to…

Recently, many Markov chain Monte Carlo methods have been developed with deterministic reversible transform proposals inspired by the Hamiltonian Monte Carlo method. The deterministic transform is relatively easy to reconcile with the local…

It is common practice in Markov chain Monte Carlo to update the simulation one variable (or sub-block of variables) at a time, rather than conduct a single full-dimensional update. When it is possible to draw from each full-conditional…

We study weighted ensemble, an interacting particle method for sampling distributions of Markov chains that has been used in computational chemistry since the 1990s. Many important applications of weighted ensemble require the computation…

Sampling the parameters of high-dimensional Continuous Time Markov Chains (CTMC) is a challenging problem with important applications in many fields of applied statistics. In this work a recently proposed type of non-reversible…

The particle Gibbs (PG) sampler is a systematic way of using a particle filter within Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). This results in an off-the-shelf Markov kernel on the space of state trajectories, which can be used to simulate from the…

We introduce a gradient-based learning method to automatically adapt Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) proposal distributions to intractable targets. We define a maximum entropy regularised objective function, referred to as generalised speed…