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In this paper, we address the challenge of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms within the approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) framework, which often get trapped in local optima due to their inherent local exploration mechanism. We…

Computation · Statistics 2025-12-16 Xuefei Cao , Shijia Wang , Yongdao Zhou

Many scientific and engineering problems require to perform Bayesian inferences in function spaces, in which the unknowns are of infinite dimension. In such problems, many standard Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms become arbitrary…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2016-04-12 Zhe Feng , Jinglai Li

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) has transformed Bayesian model inference over the past three decades: mainly because of this, Bayesian inference is now a workhorse of applied scientists. Under general conditions, MCMC sampling converges…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-11-20 Ben Lambert , Aki Vehtari

Using concentration inequalities, we give non-asymptotic confidence intervals for estimates obtained by Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulations, when using the approximation $\mathbb{E}_{\pi} f\approx (1/(N-t_0))\cdot \sum_{i=t_0+1}^N…

Probability · Mathematics 2015-09-29 Benjamin M. Gyori , Daniel Paulin

In Bayesian inference, predictive distributions are typically in the form of samples generated via Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) or related algorithms. In this paper, we conduct a systematic analysis of how to make and evaluate…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-06-25 Fabian Krüger , Sebastian Lerch , Thordis L. Thorarinsdottir , Tilmann Gneiting

Constructing unbiased estimators from Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) outputs is a difficult problem that has recently received a lot of attention in the statistics and machine learning communities. However, the current unbiased MCMC…

Computation · Statistics 2022-12-27 Guanyang Wang , Tianze Wang

Importance sampling (IS) is an important technique to reduce the estimation variance in Monte Carlo simulations. In many practical problems, however, the use of IS method may result in unbounded variance, and thus fail to provide reliable…

Computation · Statistics 2019-02-26 Tengchao Yu , Linjun Lu , Jinglai Li

Models with intractable normalizing functions have numerous applications. Because the normalizing constants are functions of the parameters of interest, standard Markov chain Monte Carlo cannot be used for Bayesian inference for these…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-03-21 Bokgyeong Kang , John Hughes , Murali Haran

Estimating Monte Carlo error is critical to valid simulation results in Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and initial sequence estimators were one of the first methods introduced for this. Over the last few years, focus has been on…

Computation · Statistics 2025-07-08 Arka Banerjee , Dootika Vats

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

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…

Computation · Statistics 2020-02-18 Johnathan Bardsley , Tiangang Cui

Stochastic gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (SGMCMC) is considered the gold standard for Bayesian inference in large-scale models, such as Bayesian neural networks. Since practitioners face speed versus accuracy tradeoffs in these models,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-19 Antonios Alexos , Alex Boyd , Stephan Mandt

There is a lack of simple and scalable algorithms for uncertainty quantification. Bayesian methods quantify uncertainty through posterior and predictive distributions, but it is difficult to rapidly estimate summaries of these…

Computation · Statistics 2016-12-28 Cheng Li , Sanvesh Srivastava , David B. Dunson

We provide a general methodology for unbiased estimation for intractable stochastic models. We consider situations where the target distribution can be written as an appropriate limit of distributions, and where conventional approaches…

Methodology · Statistics 2014-12-01 Sergios Agapiou , Gareth O. Roberts , Sebastian J. Vollmer

Bayesian computation crucially relies on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. In the case of massive data sets, running the Metropolis-Hastings sampler to draw from the posterior distribution becomes prohibitive due to the large…

Computation · Statistics 2015-12-07 Roberto Casarin , Radu V. Craiu , Fabrizio Leisen

The widespread use of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods for high-dimensional applications has motivated research into the scalability of these algorithms with respect to the dimension of the problem. Despite this, numerous problems…

Computation · Statistics 2024-10-21 Ardjen Pengel , Jun Yang , Zhou Zhou

Likelihood-free methods, such as approximate Bayesian computation, are powerful tools for practical inference problems with intractable likelihood functions. Markov chain Monte Carlo and sequential Monte Carlo variants of approximate…

Computation · Statistics 2019-02-26 David J. Warne , Ruth E. Baker , Matthew J. Simpson

We develop a novel Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method that exploits a hierarchy of models of increasing complexity to efficiently generate samples from an unnormalized target distribution. Broadly, the method rewrites the Multilevel…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-09-05 Mikkel B. Lykkegaard , Tim J. Dodwell , Colin Fox , Grigorios Mingas , Robert Scheichl

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…

Probability · Mathematics 2009-10-23 Benjamin Jourdain , Jérôme Lelong

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are widely used to sample from complicated distributions, especially to sample from the posterior distribution in Bayesian inference. However, MCMC is not directly applicable when facing the doubly…

Computation · Statistics 2019-03-29 Guanyang Wang