Related papers: Stratification as a general variance reduction met…
Model performance evaluation is a critical and expensive task in machine learning and computer vision. Without clear guidelines, practitioners often estimate model accuracy using a one-time completely random selection of the data. However,…
Many machine learning applications require operating on a spatially distributed dataset. Despite technological advances, privacy considerations and communication constraints may prevent gathering the entire dataset in a central unit. In…
Umbrella sampling is an efficient method for the calculation of free energy changes of a system along well-defined reaction coordinates. However, when multiple parallel channels along the reaction coordinate or hidden barriers in directions…
Sampling from constrained distributions has a wide range of applications, including in Bayesian optimization and robotics. Prior work establishes convergence and feasibility guarantees for constrained sampling, but assumes that the feasible…
Elliptical slice sampling is a widely used gradient-free Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm that is tuning-free and capable of adapting to local characteristics of the target distribution. However, its primary limitation is that sampling…
The key issue in importance sampling is the choice of the alternative sampling distribution, which is often chosen from the exponential tilt family of the underlying distribution. However, when the problem exhibits certain kind of…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods allow to sample a distribution known up to a multiplicative constant. Classical MCMC samplers are known to have very poor mixing properties when sampling multimodal distributions. The Equi-Energy…
The Effective Sample Size (ESS) and Integrated Autocorrelation Time (IACT) are two popular criteria for comparing Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms and detecting their convergence. Our goal is to assess those two quantities in the…
This paper investigates the use of stratified sampling as a variance reduction technique for approximating integrals over large dimensional spaces. The accuracy of this method critically depends on the choice of the space partition, the…
In this paper, we introduce efficient ensemble Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling methods for Bayesian computations in the univariate stochastic volatility model. We compare the performance of our ensemble MCMC methods with an…
Recently all major weather prediction centres provide forecast ensembles of different weather quantities which are obtained from multiple runs of numerical weather prediction models with various initial conditions and model…
We introduce a general Monte Carlo method based on Nested Sampling (NS), for sampling complex probability distributions and estimating the normalising constant. The method uses one or more particles, which explore a mixture of nested…
Exponential random graph models are extremely difficult models to handle from a statistical viewpoint, since their normalising constant, which depends on model parameters, is available only in very trivial cases. We show how inference can…
Energy-based models (EBMs) are generative models inspired by statistical physics with a wide range of applications in unsupervised learning. Their performance is best measured by the cross-entropy (CE) of the model distribution relative to…
In this work, we developed an efficient approach to compute ensemble averages in systems with pairwise-additive energetic interactions between the entities. Methods involving full enumeration of the configuration space result in exponential…
The multivariate extended skew-normal distribution allows for accommodating raw data which are skewed and heavy tailed, and has at least three appealing statistical properties, namely closure under conditioning, affine transformations, and…
We propose a novel sampling-based federated learning framework for statistical inference on M-estimators with non-smooth objective functions, which frequently arise in modern statistical applications such as quantile regression and AUC…
Bayesian hierarchical modeling is a popular approach to capturing unobserved heterogeneity across individual units. However, standard estimation methods such as Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) can be impracticable for modeling outcomes from…
We describe an MCMC method for sampling distributions with soft constraints, which are constraints that are almost but not exactly satisfied. We sample a total distribution that is a convex combination of the target soft distribution with…
Inference after model selection presents computational challenges when dealing with intractable conditional distributions. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a common method for sampling from these distributions, but its slow convergence…