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Target tracking faces the challenge in coping with large volumes of data which requires efficient methods for real time applications. The complexity considered in this paper is when there is a large number of measurements which are required…

Switching dynamical systems are an expressive model class for the analysis of time-series data. As in many fields within the natural and engineering sciences, the systems under study typically evolve continuously in time, it is natural to…

We consider various versions of adaptive Gibbs and Metropolis-within-Gibbs samplers, which update their selection probabilities (and perhaps also their proposal distributions) on the fly during a run by learning as they go in an attempt to…

Motivated by the physics of strings and branes, we develop a class of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms involving extended objects. Starting from a collection of parallel Metropolis-Hastings (MH) samplers, we place them on an…

Auxiliary variable methods such as the Parallel Tempering and the cluster Monte Carlo methods generate samples that follow a target distribution by using proposal and auxiliary distributions. In sampling from complex distributions, these…

Advances in digital sensors, digital data storage and communications have resulted in systems being capable of accumulating large collections of data. In the light of dealing with the challenges that massive data present, this work proposes…

We introduce a new Markov-Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach designed for efficient sampling of highly correlated and multimodal posteriors. Parallel tempering, though effective, is a costly technique for sampling such posteriors. Our…

We present a new Monte Carlo Markov Chain algorithm for CMB analysis in the low signal-to-noise regime. This method builds on and complements the previously described CMB Gibbs sampler, and effectively solves the low signal-to-noise…

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…

Parallel Markov Chain Monte Carlo (pMCMC) algorithms generate clouds of proposals at each step to efficiently resolve a target probability distribution. We build a rigorous foundational framework for pMCMC algorithms that situates these…

Rich data generating mechanisms are ubiquitous in this age of information and require complex statistical models to draw meaningful inference. While Bayesian analysis has seen enormous development in the last 30 years, benefitting from the…

Quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) methods for estimating integrals are attractive since the resulting estimators typically converge at a faster rate than pseudo-random Monte Carlo. However, they can be difficult to set up on arbitrary posterior…

To sample from a given target distribution, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling relies on constructing an ergodic Markov chain with the target distribution as its invariant measure. For any MCMC method, an important question is how to…

Bayesian inference in state-space models is challenging due to high-dimensional state trajectories. A viable approach is particle Markov chain Monte Carlo, combining MCMC and sequential Monte Carlo to form "exact approximations" to…

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…

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…

Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) is a methodology for sampling approximately from a sequence of probability distributions of increasing dimension and estimating their normalizing constants. We propose here an alternative methodology named…

Standard MCMC methods can scale poorly to big data settings due to the need to evaluate the likelihood at each iteration. There have been a number of approximate MCMC algorithms that use sub-sampling ideas to reduce this computational…

Adaptive Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms, which automatically tune their parameters based on past samples, have proved extremely useful in practice. The self-tuning mechanism makes them `non-Markovian', which means that their…

This paper derives two new optimization-driven Monte Carlo algorithms inspired from variable splitting and data augmentation. In particular, the formulation of one of the proposed approaches is closely related to the alternating direction…