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Closed-form stochastic filtering equations can be derived in a general setting where probability distributions are replaced by some specific outer measures. In this article, we study how the principles of the sequential Monte Carlo method…
Particle Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods are used to carry out inference in non-linear and non-Gaussian state space models, where the posterior density of the states is approximated using particles. Current approaches usually perform…
This paper addresses the problem of Monte Carlo approximation of posterior probability distributions. In particular, we have considered a recently proposed technique known as population Monte Carlo (PMC), which is based on an iterative…
Adaptive Monte Carlo methods are very efficient techniques designed to tune simulation estimators on-line. In this work, we present an alternative to stochastic approximation to tune the optimal change of measure in the context of…
Adaptive importance sampling (AIS) methods provide a useful alternative to Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms for performing inference of intractable distributions. Population Monte Carlo (PMC) algorithms constitute a family of AIS…
We establish epigraphical and uniform laws of large numbers for sample-based approximations of law invariant risk functionals. These sample-based approximation schemes include Monte Carlo (MC) and certain randomized quasi-Monte Carlo…
Importance sampling is a Monte Carlo technique for efficiently estimating the likelihood of rare events by biasing the sampling distribution towards the rare event of interest. By drawing weighted samples from a learned proposal…
Monte Carlo (MC) sampling algorithms are an extremely widely-used technique to estimate expectations of functions f(x), especially in high dimensions. Control variates are a very powerful technique to reduce the error of such estimates, but…
Monte Carlo approximations for random linear elliptic PDE constrained optimization problems are studied. We use empirical process theory to obtain best possible mean convergence rates $O(n^{-\frac{1}{2}})$ for optimal values and solutions,…
Approximate inference in probabilistic graphical models (PGMs) can be grouped into deterministic methods and Monte-Carlo-based methods. The former can often provide accurate and rapid inferences, but are typically associated with biases…
The performance of the Monte Carlo sampling methods relies on the crucial choice of a proposal density. The notion of optimality is fundamental to design suitable adaptive procedures of the proposal density within Monte Carlo schemes. This…
Stochastic approximation Monte Carlo (SAMC) has recently been proposed by Liang, Liu and Carroll [J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 102 (2007) 305--320] as a general simulation and optimization algorithm. In this paper, we propose to improve its…
High-quality random samples of quantum states are needed for a variety of tasks in quantum information and quantum computation. Searching the high-dimensional quantum state space for a global maximum of an objective function with many local…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a Markov chain algorithm for sampling from a high-dimensional distribution with density $e^{-f(x)}$, given access to the gradient of $f$. A particular case of interest is that of a $d$-dimensional Gaussian…
We consider conditional tests for non-negative discrete exponential families. We develop two Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms which allow us to sample from the conditional space and to perform approximated tests. The first…
Monte Carlo methods are widely used for approximating complicated, multidimensional integrals for Bayesian inference. Population Monte Carlo (PMC) is an important class of Monte Carlo methods, which utilizes a population of proposals to…
In this paper, we consider convex stochastic optimization problems arising in machine learning applications (e.g., risk minimization) and mathematical statistics (e.g., maximum likelihood estimation). There are two main approaches to solve…
We propose extensions and improvements of the statistical analysis of distributed multipoles (SADM) algorithm put forth by Chipot et al. in [6] for the derivation of distributed atomic multipoles from the quantum-mechanical electrostatic…
We consider parametric Markov decision processes (pMDPs) that are augmented with unknown probability distributions over parameter values. The problem is to compute the probability to satisfy a temporal logic specification with any concrete…
Segmenting images of low quality or with missing data is a challenging problem. Integrating statistical prior information about the shapes to be segmented can improve the segmentation results significantly. Most shape-based segmentation…