Related papers: Rapidly Mixing Markov Chain Monte Carlo Technique …
Replica exchange Monte Carlo (reMC), also known as parallel tempering, is an important technique for accelerating the convergence of the conventional Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. However, such a method requires the evaluation…
This paper focuses on variational inference with intractable likelihood functions that can be unbiasedly estimated. A flexible variational approximation based on Gaussian mixtures is developed, by adopting the mixture population Monte Carlo…
The Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are popular when considering sampling from a high-dimensional random variable $\mathbf{x}$ with possibly unnormalised probability density $p$ and observed data $\mathbf{d}$. However, MCMC requires…
Slow mixing is the central hurdle when working with Markov chains, especially those used for Monte Carlo approximations (MCMC). In many applications, it is only of interest to estimate the stationary expectations of a small set of…
We propose quantum algorithms that provide provable speedups for Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods commonly used for sampling from probability distributions of the form $\pi \propto e^{-f}$, where $f$ is a potential function. Our…
Restricted Boltzmann Machines are simple and powerful generative models that can encode any complex dataset. Despite all their advantages, in practice the trainings are often unstable and it is difficult to assess their quality because the…
This study proposes a trainable sampling-based solver for combinatorial optimization problems (COPs) using a deep-learning technique called deep unfolding. The proposed solver is based on the Ohzeki method that combines Markov-chain…
The switch Markov chain has been extensively studied as the most natural Markov Chain Monte Carlo approach for sampling graphs with prescribed degree sequences. We use comparison arguments with other, less natural but simpler to analyze,…
Exact approximations of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are a general emerging class of sampling algorithms. One of the main ideas behind exact approximations consists of replacing intractable quantities required to run standard…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are widely used to sample from complicated distributions, especially to sample from the posterior distribution in Bayesian inference. However, MCMC is not directly applicable when facing the doubly…
The configuration model is a standard tool for uniformly generating random graphs with a specified degree sequence, and is often used as a null model to evaluate how much of an observed network's structure can be explained by its degree…
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…
Motivated by applications of distributed linear estimation, distributed control and distributed optimization, we consider the question of designing linear iterative algorithms for computing the average of numbers in a network. Specifically,…
This paper presents a new Markov chain Monte Carlo method to sample from the posterior distribution of conjugate mixture models. This algorithm relies on a flexible split-merge procedure built using the particle Gibbs sampler. Contrary to…
We show how to exploit symmetries of a graph to efficiently compute the fastest mixing Markov chain on the graph (i.e., find the transition probabilities on the edges to minimize the second-largest eigenvalue modulus of the transition…
In many hierarchical inverse problems, not only do we want to estimate high- or infinite-dimensional model parameters in the parameter-to-observable maps, but we also have to estimate hyperparameters that represent critical assumptions in…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are ubiquitous in probability theory in general and in machine learning in particular. A Markov chain is devised so that its stationary distribution is some probability distribution of interest.…
We introduce a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method that is designed to sample from target distributions with irregular geometry using an adaptive scheme. In cases where targets exhibit non-Gaussian behaviour, we propose that adaption…
We consider the problem of inference in discrete probabilistic models, that is, distributions over subsets of a finite ground set. These encompass a range of well-known models in machine learning, such as determinantal point processes and…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods generate samples that are asymptotically distributed from a target distribution of interest as the number of iterations goes to infinity. Various theoretical results provide upper bounds on the…