Related papers: Coupling and Decoupling to bound an approximating …
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are widely used in machine learning. One of the major problems with MCMC is the question of how to design chains that mix fast over the whole state space; in particular, how to select the parameters…
There has been a recent surge of interest in coupling methods for Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms: they facilitate convergence quantification and unbiased estimation, while exploiting embarrassingly parallel computing capabilities.…
Canonical paths is one of the most powerful tools available to show that a Markov chain is rapidly mixing, thereby enabling approximate sampling from complex high dimensional distributions. Two success stories for the canonical paths method…
When two Markov operators commute, it suggests that we can couple two copies of one of the corresponding processes. We explicitly construct a number of couplings of this type for a commuting family of Markov processes on the set of…
Markov chains are an important tool for modelling and evaluating systems in computer science, economics, biology and numerous other fields. Thus, approximating Markov chains is a useful tool for decreasing the computational effort needed…
Markov jump processes (MJPs) are continuous-time stochastic processes widely used in a variety of applied disciplines. Inference for MJPs typically proceeds via Markov chain Monte Carlo, the state-of-the-art being a uniformization-based…
Autocorrelations in MCMC chains increase the variance of the estimators they produce. We propose the occlusion process to mitigate this problem. It is a process that sits upon an existing MCMC sampler, and occasionally replaces its samples…
When implementing Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms, perturbation caused by numerical errors is sometimes inevitable. This paper studies how perturbation of MCMC affects the convergence speed and Monte Carlo estimation accuracy.…
We introduce a framework to approximate a Markov Decision Process that stands on two pillars: state aggregation -- as the algorithmic infrastructure; and central-limit-theorem-type approximations -- as the mathematical underpinning of…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are foundational algorithms for Bayesian inference and probabilistic modeling. However, most MCMC algorithms are inherently sequential and their time complexity scales linearly with the sequence…
We discuss a Monte Carlo Markov Chain (MCMC) procedure for the random sampling of some one-dimensional lattice paths with constraints, for various constraints. We show that an approach inspired by optimal transport allows us to bound…
Correlation clustering is a widely-used approach for clustering large data sets based only on pairwise similarity information. In recent years, there has been a steady stream of better and better classical algorithms for approximating this…
In this paper we examine the importance of the choice of metric in path coupling, and the relationship of this to \emph{stopping time analysis}. We give strong evidence that stopping time analysis is no more powerful than standard path…
In [4], we examined the use of coupling to obtain bounds on the mixing time of statistics on Markov chains. In the present paper, we consider the same general problem, but using strong stationary times rather than coupling. We discuss…
In this paper we discuss weak convergence of continuous-time Markov chains to a non-symmetric pure jump process. We approach this problem using Dirichlet forms as well as semimartingales. As an application, we discuss how to approximate a…
We consider the averaging principle for deterministic or stochastic systems with a fast stochastic component (family of continuous-time Markov chains depending on the state of the system as a parameter). We show that, due to bifurcations in…
Large deviations for additive path functionals of stochastic processes have attracted significant research interest, in particular in the context of stochastic particle systems and statistical physics. Efficient numerical `cloning'…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are employed to sample from a given distribution of interest, whenever either the distribution does not exist in closed form, or, if it does, no efficient method to simulate an independent sample from…
We describe parallel Markov chain Monte Carlo methods that propagate a collective ensemble of paths, with local covariance information calculated from neighboring replicas. The use of collective dynamics eliminates multiplicative noise and…
Using Markov chain Monte Carlo to sample from posterior distributions was the key innovation which made Bayesian data analysis practical. Notoriously, however, MCMC is hard to tune, hard to diagnose, and hard to parallelize. This…