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We develop a modular approach to Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling for unnormalized target densities. In this approach, Markov chains are constructed in parallel, each constrained to a subset of the target space. The Monte Carlo…

Computation · Statistics 2026-05-05 Joonha Park

It is widely known that the performance of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) can degrade quickly when targeting computationally expensive posterior distributions, such as when the sample size is large. This has motivated the search for MCMC…

Computation · Statistics 2024-12-02 James E. Johndrow , Natesh S. Pillai , Aaron Smith

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a computational approach to fundamental problems such as inference, integration, optimization, and simulation. The field has developed a broad spectrum of algorithms, varying in the way they are motivated,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-01 Kirill Neklyudov , Max Welling , Evgenii Egorov , Dmitry Vetrov

This paper introduces a Bayesian framework that combines Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling, dimensionality reduction, and neural density estimation to efficiently handle inverse problems that (i) must be solved multiple times, and…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Giacomo Bottacini , Matteo Torzoni , Andrea Manzoni

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are commonly used for their versatility in sampling from complicated probability distributions. However, as the dimension of the distribution gets larger, the computational costs for a satisfactory…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2020-12-01 Hector J. Hortua , Riccardo Volpi , Dimitri Marinelli , Luigi Malago

Accept-reject based Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are the workhorse algorithm for Bayesian inference. These algorithms, like Metropolis-Hastings, require choosing a proposal distribution which is typically informed by the desired…

Computation · Statistics 2026-04-21 Dwija Kakkad , Dootika Vats

We construct a new framework for accelerating Markov chain Monte Carlo in posterior sampling problems where standard methods are limited by the computational cost of the likelihood, or of numerical models embedded therein. Our approach…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-01-06 Patrick R. Conrad , Youssef M. Marzouk , Natesh S. Pillai , Aaron Smith

Optimizing or sampling complex cost functions of combinatorial optimization problems is a longstanding challenge across disciplines and applications. When employing family of conventional algorithms based on Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-15 Dmitrii Dobrynin , Masoud Mohseni , John Paul Strachan

Many problems in the physical sciences, machine learning, and statistical inference necessitate sampling from a high-dimensional, multi-modal probability distribution. Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms, the ubiquitous tool for this…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2022-05-12 Marylou Gabrié , Grant M. Rotskoff , Eric Vanden-Eijnden

We consider the theoretical analysis of Multiscale Sampling Methods, which are a new class of gradient-free Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods for high dimensional inverse differential equation problems. A detailed presentation of…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-03-06 Lucas Seiffert , Felipe Pereira

A novel class of non-reversible Markov chain Monte Carlo schemes relying on continuous-time piecewise-deterministic Markov Processes has recently emerged. In these algorithms, the state of the Markov process evolves according to a…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-05-16 Paul Vanetti , Alexandre Bouchard-Côté , George Deligiannidis , Arnaud Doucet

The Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm is a widely recognised as an efficient method for sampling a specified posterior distribution. However, when the posterior is multi-modal, conventional MCMC algorithms either tend to become…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2014-08-19 Yi-Ming Hu , Martin Hendry , Ik Siong Heng

We present a novel Bayesian inference tool that uses a neural network to parameterise efficient Markov Chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC) proposals. The target distribution is first transformed into a diagonal, unit variance Gaussian by a series of…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2020-06-03 Adam Moss

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have not been broadly adopted in Bayesian neural networks (BNNs). This paper initially reviews the main challenges in sampling from the parameter posterior of a neural network via MCMC. Such…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-10-05 Theodore Papamarkou , Jacob Hinkle , M. Todd Young , David Womble

We introduce \textit{Policy Guided Monte Carlo} (PGMC), a computational framework using reinforcement learning to improve Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling. The methodology is generally applicable, unbiased and opens up a new path to…

Computational Physics · Physics 2018-12-12 Troels Arnfred Bojesen

In this paper, we propose an efficient pseudo-marginal Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling approach to draw samples from posterior shape distributions for image segmentation. The computation time of the proposed approach is independent…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2018-09-05 Ertunc Erdil , Sinan Yildirim , Tolga Tasdizen , Mujdat Cetin

Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods are not only a popular tool in the analysis of state space models, but offer an alternative to MCMC in situations where Bayesian inference must proceed via simulation. This paper introduces a new SMC…

Computation · Statistics 2010-05-11 Paul Fearnhead , Benjamin M. Taylor

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a powerful methodology for the approximation of posterior distributions. However, the iterative nature of MCMC does not naturally facilitate its use with modern highly parallel computation on HPC and cloud…

Continuous normalizing flows (CNFs) learn the probability path between a reference distribution and a target distribution by modeling the vector field generating said path using neural networks. Recently, Lipman et al. (2022) introduced a…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-10-29 Alberto Cabezas , Louis Sharrock , Christopher Nemeth

We introduce a new micro-macro Markov chain Monte Carlo method (mM-MCMC) to sample invariant distributions of molecular dynamics systems that exhibit a time-scale separation between the microscopic (fast) dynamics, and the macroscopic…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2020-02-24 Hannes Vandecasteele , Giovanni Samaey