Related papers: Comparing the Switch and Curveball Markov Chains f…

Linear constrained switching systems are linear switched systems whose switching sequences are constrained by a deterministic finite automaton. This work investigates how to generate a sequence of matrices with an asymptotic growth rate…

Discovered in the context of card shuffling by Aldous, Diaconis and Shahshahani, the cutoff phenomenon has since then been established in a variety of Markov chains. However, proving cutoff remains a delicate affair, which requires a…

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 consider the problem of sampling a multimodal distribution with a Markov chain given a small number of samples from the stationary measure. Although mixing can be arbitrarily slow, we show that if the Markov chain has a $k$th order…

Upon the introduction of the Metropolis algorithm, the question of how many steps in the Markov chain were needed to achieve convergence to stationarity became apparent. The convergence was rather slow, i.e. for a process on $n$ states the…

We discuss a non-reversible, lifted Markov-chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm for particle systems in which the direction of proposed displacements is changed deterministically. This algorithm sweeps through directions analogously to the…

Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling methods often suffer from long correlation times. Consequently, these methods must be run for many steps to generate an independent sample. In this paper a method is proposed to overcome this difficulty.…

Markov chain Monte Carlo methods are a powerful tool for sampling equilibrium configurations in complex systems. One problem these methods often face is slow convergence over large energy barriers. In this work, we propose a novel method…

We show that the existence of a "good"' coupling w.r.t. Hamming distance for any local Markov chain on a discrete product space implies rapid mixing of the Glauber dynamics in a blackbox fashion. More specifically, we only require the…

The Importance Markov chain is a novel algorithm bridging the gap between rejection sampling and importance sampling, moving from one to the other through a tuning parameter. Based on a modified sample of an instrumental Markov chain…

This paper considers stochastic-constrained stochastic optimization where the stochastic constraint is to satisfy that the expectation of a random function is below a certain threshold. In particular, we study the setting where data samples…

Performing numerical integration when the integrand itself cannot be evaluated point-wise is a challenging task that arises in statistical analysis, notably in Bayesian inference for models with intractable likelihood functions. Markov…

We introduce simple conditions ensuring that invariant distributions of a Feller Markov chain on a compact Riemannian manifold are absolutely continuous with a lower semi-continuous, continuous or smooth density with respect to the…

Gibbs sampling is a common procedure used to fit finite mixture models. However, it is known to be slow to converge when exploring correlated regions of a parameter space and so blocking correlated parameters is sometimes implemented in…

Gibbs sampling is one of the most commonly used Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms due to its simplicity and efficiency. It cycles through the latent variables, sampling each one from its distribution conditional on the current…

We introduce a new embarrassingly parallel parameter learning algorithm for Markov random fields with untied parameters which is efficient for a large class of practical models. Our algorithm parallelizes naturally over cliques and, for…

We study time-changed Markov processes to speed up the convergence of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. The time-changed process is defined by adjusting the speed of time of a base process via a user-chosen, state-dependent…

A block Markov chain is a Markov chain whose state space can be partitioned into a finite number of clusters such that the transition probabilities only depend on the clusters. Block Markov chains thus serve as a model for Markov chains…

A key task in Bayesian statistics is sampling from distributions that are only specified up to a partition function (i.e., constant of proportionality). However, without any assumptions, sampling (even approximately) can be #P-hard, and few…

There has been a recent surge of powerful tools to show rapid mixing of Markov chains, via functional inequalities such as Poincar\'e inequalities. In many situations, Markov chains fail to mix rapidly from a worst-case initialization, yet…