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We propose a new Monte Carlo method for sampling from multimodal distributions. The idea of this technique is based on splitting the task into two: finding the modes of a target distribution $\pi$ and sampling, given the knowledge of the…
In this paper we study the ergodicity properties of some adaptive Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms (MCMC) that have been recently proposed in the literature. We prove that under a set of verifiable conditions, ergodic averages calculated…
Collective phenomena, whereby agent-agent interactions determine spatial patterns, are ubiquitous in the animal kingdom. On the other hand, movement and space use are also greatly influenced by the interactions between animals and their…
We develop a novel advanced Particle Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm that is capable of sampling from the posterior distribution of non-linear state space models for both the unobserved latent states and the unknown model parameters. We…
Stochastic kinetic models (SKMs) are increasingly used to account for the inherent stochasticity exhibited by interacting populations of species in areas such as epidemiology, population ecology and systems biology. Species numbers are…
Cognitive diagnosis models (CDMs) are useful statistical tools to provide rich information relevant for intervention and learning. As a popular approach to estimate and make inference of CDMs, the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm…
Cyclical MCMC is a novel MCMC framework recently proposed by Zhang et al. (2019) to address the challenge posed by high-dimensional multimodal posterior distributions like those arising in deep learning. The algorithm works by generating a…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm that avoids the random walk behavior and sensitivity to correlated parameters that plague many MCMC methods by taking a series of steps informed by first-order…
Generative models derived from large protein sequence alignments define complex fitness landscapes, but their utility for accurately modeling non-equilibrium evolutionary dynamics remains unclear. In this work, we perform a rigorous…
We propose a new class of learning algorithms that combines variational approximation and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation. Naive algorithms that use the variational approximation as proposal distribution can perform poorly…
Functional mixed models are widely useful for regression analysis with dependent functional data, including longitudinal functional data with scalar predictors. However, existing algorithms for Bayesian inference with these models only…
Hidden Markov models (HMMs) have been used increasingly to understand how movement patterns of animals arise from behavioural states. An animal is assumed to transition between behavioural states through time, as described by transition…
Bayesian inference of Gibbs random fields (GRFs) is often referred to as a doubly intractable problem, since the likelihood function is intractable. The exploration of the posterior distribution of such models is typically carried out with…
A new class of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms, based on simulating piecewise deterministic Markov processes (PDMPs), have recently shown great promise: they are non-reversible, can mix better than standard MCMC algorithms, and…
The processes influencing animal movement and resource selection are complex and varied. Past efforts to model behavioral changes over time used Bayesian statistical models with variable parameter space, such as reversible-jump Markov chain…
1. The utilisation distribution describes the relative probability of use of a spatial unit by an animal. It is natural to think of it as the long-term consequence of the animal's short-term movement decisions: it is the accumulation of…
We consider parallel asynchronous Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling for problems where we can leverage (stochastic) gradients to define continuous dynamics which explore the target distribution. We outline a solution strategy for…
We demonstrate the use of a variational method to determine a quantitative lower bound on the rate of convergence of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms as a function of the target density and proposal density. The bound relies on…
1. Advances in tracking technology have led to an exponential increase in animal location data, greatly enhancing our ability to address interesting questions in movement ecology, but also presenting new challenges related to data manage-…
In geostatistics, Gaussian random fields are often used to model heterogeneities of soil or subsurface parameters. To give spatial approximations of these random fields, they are discretized. Then, different techniques of geostatistical…