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We introduce new Gaussian proposals to improve the efficiency of the standard Hastings-Metropolis algorithm in Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, used for the sampling from a target distribution in large dimension $d$. The improved…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2016-11-28 Alain Durmus , Gareth O. Roberts , Gilles Vilmart , Konstantinos C. Zygalakis

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are a powerful tool for computation with complex probability distributions. However the performance of such methods is critically dependant on properly tuned parameters, most of which are difficult if…

Computation · Statistics 2021-10-27 James A. Brofos , Marylou Gabrié , Marcus A. Brubaker , Roy R. Lederman

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…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2013-05-29 Fergal P. Casey , Joshua J. Waterfall , Ryan N. Gutenkunst , Christopher R. Myers , James P. Sethna

We describe and analyze a variance reduction approach for Monte Carlo (MC) sampling that accelerates the estimation of statistics of computationally expensive simulation models using an ensemble of models with lower cost. These lower cost…

Computation · Statistics 2021-05-04 Alex A. Gorodetsky , Gianluca Geraci , Mike Eldred , John D. Jakeman

There are two ways of speeding up MCMC algorithms: (1) construct more complex samplers that use gradient and higher order information about the target and (2) design a control variate to reduce the asymptotic variance. While the efficiency…

Probability · Mathematics 2019-06-19 Aleksandar Mijatović , Jure Vogrinc

The control variates method is a classical variance reduction technique for Monte Carlo estimators that exploits correlated auxiliary variables without introducing bias. In many applications, the quantity of interest can be expressed as a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-11-10 Louison Bocquet-Nouaille , Jérôme Morio , Benjamin Bobbia

We study the underdamped Langevin diffusion when the log of the target distribution is smooth and strongly concave. We present a MCMC algorithm based on its discretization and show that it achieves $\varepsilon$ error (in 2-Wasserstein…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-01-30 Xiang Cheng , Niladri S. Chatterji , Peter L. Bartlett , Michael I. Jordan

Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC) is an iterative algorithm used to generate samples from a distribution that is known only up to a normalizing constant. The nonasymptotic dependence of its mixing time on the dimension and target accuracy is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-26 Niladri S. Chatterji , Jelena Diakonikolas , Michael I. Jordan , Peter L. Bartlett

We study the problem of approximate sampling from non-log-concave distributions, e.g., Gaussian mixtures, which is often challenging even in low dimensions due to their multimodality. We focus on performing this task via Markov chain Monte…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-30 Tim Tsz-Kit Lau , Han Liu , Thomas Pock

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo and underdamped Langevin Monte Carlo are state-of-the-art methods for taking samples from high-dimensional distributions with a differentiable density function. To generate samples, they numerically integrate…

Computation · Statistics 2025-05-20 Jakob Robnik , Reuben Cohn-Gordon , Uroš Seljak

This paper presents a control variate-based Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm for efficient sampling from the probability simplex, with a focus on applications in large-scale Bayesian models such as latent Dirichlet allocation. Standard…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-10-02 Francesco Barile , Christopher Nemeth

Global fits of physics models require efficient methods for exploring high-dimensional and/or multimodal posterior functions. We introduce a novel method for accelerating Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling by pairing a…

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology · Physics 2023-09-06 N. T. Hunt-Smith , W. Melnitchouk , F. Ringer , N. Sato , A. W Thomas , M. J. White

Inexact Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods rely on Markov chains that do not exactly preserve the target distribution. Examples include the unadjusted Langevin algorithm (ULA) and unadjusted Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (uHMC). This paper…

Probability · Mathematics 2023-04-13 Alain Oliviero Durmus , Andreas Eberle

This paper introduces a Bayesian framework that combines Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling, dimensionality reduction, and neural density estimation to efficiently handle inverse problems that (i) must be solved multiple times, and…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Giacomo Bottacini , Matteo Torzoni , Andrea Manzoni

In engineering examples, one often encounters the need to sample from unnormalized distributions with complex shapes that may also be implicitly defined through a physical or numerical simulation model, making it computationally expensive…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-11-27 Promit Chakroborty , Michael D. Shields

The Monte Carlo within Metropolis (MCwM) algorithm, interpreted as a perturbed Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithm, provides an approach for approximate sampling when the target distribution is intractable. Assuming the unperturbed Markov…

Computation · Statistics 2019-07-31 Felipe Medina-Aguayo , Daniel Rudolf , Nikolaus Schweizer

In this paper we propose a novel and practical variance reduction approach for additive functionals of dependent sequences. Our approach combines the use of control variates with the minimisation of an empirical variance estimate. We…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-08-18 D. Belomestny , L. Iosipoi , E. Moulines , A. Naumov , S. Samsonov

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a powerful Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm for estimating expectations with respect to continuous un-normalized probability distributions. MCMC estimators typically have higher variance than…

Computation · Statistics 2020-03-04 Dan Piponi , Matthew D. Hoffman , Pavel Sountsov

MCMC methods are used in Bayesian statistics not only to sample from posterior distributions but also to estimate expectations. Underlying functions are most often defined on a continuous state space and can be unbounded. We consider a…

Methodology · Statistics 2009-07-29 Krzysztof Latuszynski , Blazej Miasojedow , Wojciech Niemiro

We propose an algorithm for the efficient and robust sampling of the posterior probability distribution in Bayesian inference problems. The algorithm combines the local search capabilities of the Manifold Metropolis Adjusted Langevin…