Related papers: Wasserstein-based methods for convergence complexi…
To avoid poor empirical performance in Metropolis-Hastings and other accept-reject-based algorithms practitioners often tune them by trial and error. Lower bounds on the convergence rate are developed in both total variation and Wasserstein…
We introduce a unified framework to estimate the convergence of Markov chains to equilibrium in Wasserstein distance. The framework can provide convergence bounds with rates ranging from polynomial to exponential, all derived from a…
The use of MCMC algorithms in high dimensional Bayesian problems has become routine. This has spurred so-called convergence complexity analysis, the goal of which is to ascertain how the convergence rate of a Monte Carlo Markov chain scales…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) provides asymptotically consistent estimates of intractable posterior expectations as the number of iterations tends to infinity. However, in large data applications, MCMC can be computationally expensive per…
We study the approximation of a (finite) continuous-time Markov chain by a Markov chain on a reduced state space, and we provide formal error bounds for the approximated transient distributions in the Wasserstein distance. These bounds…
Over the last three decades, there has been a considerable effort within the applied probability community to develop techniques for bounding the convergence rates of general state space Markov chains. Most of these results assume the…
The Wasserstein distance received a lot of attention recently in the community of machine learning, especially for its principled way of comparing distributions. It has found numerous applications in several hard problems, such as domain…
In this paper, we provide sufficient conditions for the existence of the invariant distribution and for subgeometric rates of convergence in Wasserstein distance for general state-space Markov chains which are (possibly) not irreducible.…
Bayesian inference typically requires the computation of an approximation to the posterior distribution. An important requirement for an approximate Bayesian inference algorithm is to output high-accuracy posterior mean and uncertainty…
This paper considers the problem of regression over distributions, which is becoming increasingly important in machine learning. Existing approaches often ignore the geometry of the probability space or are computationally expensive. To…
The Wasserstein barycenter is a geometric construct which captures the notion of centrality among probability distributions, and which has found many applications in machine learning. However, most algorithms for finding even an approximate…
We consider adaptive increasingly rare Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms, which are adaptive MCMC methods, where the adaptation concerning the "past'' happens less and less frequently over time. Under a contraction assumption with…
The Wasserstein metric is an important measure of distance between probability distributions, with applications in machine learning, statistics, probability theory, and data analysis. This paper provides upper and lower bounds on…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) lies at the core of modern Bayesian methodology, much of which would be impossible without it. Thus, the convergence properties of MCMCs have received significant attention, and in particular, proving…
We present a framework for obtaining explicit bounds on the rate of convergence to equilibrium of a Markov chain on a general state space, with respect to both total variation and Wasserstein distances. For Wasserstein bounds, our main tool…
We derive quantitative bounds on the rate of convergence in $L^1$ Wasserstein distance of general M-estimators, with an almost sharp (up to a logarithmic term) behavior in the number of observations. We focus on situations where the…
This paper presents a new approach to the classical problem of quantifying posterior contraction rates (PCRs) in Bayesian statistics. Our approach relies on Wasserstein distance, and it leads to two main contributions which improve on the…
Approximating a probability distribution using a set of particles is a fundamental problem in machine learning and statistics, with applications including clustering and quantization. Formally, we seek a weighted mixture of Dirac measures…
Wasserstein barycenters provide a principled approach for aggregating probability measures, while preserving the geometry of their ambient space. Existing discrete methods are not scalable as they assume access to the complete set of…
Comparing probability distributions is at the crux of many machine learning algorithms. Maximum Mean Discrepancies (MMD) and Wasserstein distances are two classes of distances between probability distributions that have attracted abundant…