Related papers: Coupling and Decoupling to bound an approximating …

We use coupling to study the time taken until the distribution of a statistic on a Markov chain is close to its stationary distribution. Coupling is a common technique used to obtain upper bounds on mixing times of Markov chains, and we…

This review paper provides an introduction of Markov chains and their convergence rates which is an important and interesting mathematical topic which also has important applications for very widely used Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)…

We survey existing techniques to bound the mixing time of Markov chains. The mixing time is related to a geometric parameter called conductance which is a measure of edge-expansion. Bounds on conductance are typically obtained by a…

Couplings play a central role in contemporary Markov chain Monte Carlo methods and in the analysis of their convergence to stationarity. In most cases, a coupling must induce relatively fast meeting between chains to ensure good…

In this paper we develop a general framework for constructing and analysing coupled Markov chain Monte Carlo samplers, allowing for both (possibly degenerate) diffusion and piecewise deterministic Markov processes. For many performance…

Convergence diagnosis for Markov chain Monte Carlo is a matter of fundamental importance in computational statistics: it determines the resources allocated to a particular sampling problem and influences the practitioner's view of the…

The notion of a successful coupling of Markov processes, based on the idea that both components of the coupled system ``intersect'' in finite time with probability one, is extended to cover situations when the coupling is unnecessarily…

This review paper, written for the second edition of the Handbook of Markov Chain Monte Carlo, provides an introduction to the study of convergence analysis for Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), aimed at researchers new to the field. We…

It has become increasingly easy nowadays to collect approximate posterior samples via fast algorithms such as variational Bayes, but concerns exist about the estimation accuracy. It is tempting to build solutions that exploit approximate…

We present a novel approach to quantizing Markov chains. The approach is based on the Markov chain coupling method, which is frequently used to prove fast mixing. Given a particular coupling, e.g., a grand coupling, we construct a…

We consider the Markov chain approximations for singular stable-like processes. First we obtain properties of some Markov chains. Then we construct the approximating Markov chains and give a necessary condition for weak convergence of these…

Importance sampling of trajectories has proved a uniquely successful strategy for exploring rare dynamical behaviors of complex systems in an unbiased way. Carrying out this sampling, however, requires an ability to propose changes to…

Filtering---estimating the state of a partially observable Markov process from a sequence of observations---is one of the most widely studied problems in control theory, AI, and computational statistics. Exact computation of the posterior…

Couplings play a central role in the analysis of Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms and appear increasingly often in the algorithms themselves, e.g. in convergence diagnostics, parallelization, and variance reduction techniques. Existing…

We consider the problem of estimating the measure of subsets in very large networks. A prime tool for this purpose is the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm. This algorithm, while extremely useful in many cases, still often suffers…

The Markov Chain Monte Carlo method is the dominant paradigm for posterior computation in Bayesian analysis. It is common to control computation time by making approximations to the Markov transition kernel. Comparatively little attention…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods provide consistent of integrals as the number of iterations goes to infinity. MCMC estimators are generally biased after any fixed number of iterations. We propose to remove this bias by using…

We formulate some simple conditions under which a Markov chain may be approximated by the solution to a differential equation, with quantifiable error probabilities. The role of a choice of coordinate functions for the Markov chain is…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are often used for approximate inference inside learning, but their slow mixing can be difficult to diagnose and the approximations can seriously degrade learning. To alleviate these issues, we…

We present a new framework to derandomise certain Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. As in MCMC, we first reduce counting problems to sampling from a sequence of marginal distributions. For the latter task, we introduce a method…