Related papers: On the Metric-based Approximate Minimization of Ma…

Many Bayesian inference problems involve target distributions whose density functions are computationally expensive to evaluate. Replacing the target density with a local approximation based on a small number of carefully chosen density…

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…

This paper considers a new approach to using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) in contexts where one may adopt multilevel (ML) Monte Carlo. The underlying problem is to approximate expectations w.r.t. an underlying probability measure that is…

This paper considers an optimization problem for a dynamical system whose evolution depends on a collection of binary decision variables. We develop scalable approximation algorithms with provable suboptimality bounds to provide…

Existing value function approximation methods have been successfully used in many applications, but they often lack useful a priori error bounds. We propose a new approximate bilinear programming formulation of value function approximation,…

Bayesian analysis for Markov jump processes is a non-trivial and challenging problem. Although exact inference is theoretically possible, it is computationally demanding thus its applicability is limited to a small class of problems. In…

We derive, similar to Lau and Riha, a matrix formulation of a general best approximation theorem of Singer for the special case of spectral approximations of a given matrix from a given subspace. Using our matrix formulation we describe the…

We introduce a revised derivation of the bitwise Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) detector. The new approach resolves the previously reported high SNR stalling problem of MCMC without the need for…

This paper introduces a concept of approximate spectral gap to analyze the mixing time of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms for which the usual spectral gap is degenerate or almost degenerate. We use the idea to analyze a class of…

We develop a pseudo-metric analogue of bisimulation for generalized semi-Markov processes. The kernel of this pseudo-metric corresponds to bisimulation; thus we have extended bisimulation for continuous-time probabilistic processes to a…

Imprecise continuous-time Markov chains are a robust type of continuous-time Markov chains that allow for partially specified time-dependent parameters. Computing inferences for them requires the solution of a non-linear differential…

This paper introduces a framework for speeding up Bayesian inference conducted in presence of large datasets. We design a Markov chain whose transition kernel uses an (unknown) fraction of (fixed size) of the available data that is randomly…

We study a generalization of the well-known disjoint paths problem which we call the metric Menger problem, denoted MM(r,k), where one is given two subsets of a graph and must decide whether they can be connected by $k$ paths of pairwise…

We show that any submodular minimization (SM) problem defined on a linear constraint set with constraints having up to two variables per inequality, are 2-approximable in polynomial time. If the constraints are monotone (the two variables…

We define the min-min expectation selection problem (resp. max-min expectation selection problem) to be that of selecting k out of n given discrete probability distributions, to minimize (resp. maximize) the expectation of the minimum value…

This work introduces a notion of approximate probabilistic trace equivalence for labelled Markov chains, and relates this new concept to the known notion of approximate probabilistic bisimulation. In particular this work shows that the…

Model Predictive Control (MPC) offers rigorous safety and performance guarantees but is computationally intensive. Approximate MPC (AMPC) aims to circumvent this drawback by learning a computationally cheaper surrogate policy. Common…

This paper studies the optimal control problem for discrete-time nonlinear systems and an approximate dynamic programming-based Model Predictive Control (MPC) scheme is proposed for minimizing a quadratic performance measure. In the…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques are now widely used for cosmological parameter estimation. Chains are generated to sample the posterior probability distribution obtained following the Bayesian approach. An important issue is how…

Labeled Markov Chains (or LMCs for short) are useful mathematical objects to model complex probabilistic languages. A central challenge is to compare two LMCs, for example to assess the accuracy of an abstraction or to quantify the effect…