Related papers: Non-Reversible Parallel Tempering: a Scalable High…
We present here two irreversible Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms for general discrete state systems, one of the algorithms is based on the random-scan Gibbs sampler for discrete states and the other on its improved version, the…
Parallel tempering, also known as replica exchange sampling, is an important method for simulating complex systems. In this algorithm simulations are conducted in parallel at a series of temperatures, and the key feature of the algorithm is…
In Monte-Carlo methods the Markov processes used to sample a given target distribution usually satisfy detailed balance, i.e. they are time-reversible. However, relatively recent results have demonstrated that appropriate reversible and…
Performing numerical integration when the integrand itself cannot be evaluated point-wise is a challenging task that arises in statistical analysis, notably in Bayesian inference for models with intractable likelihood functions. Markov…
We present a general framework for accelerating a large class of widely used Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. Our approach exploits fast, iterative approximations to the target density to speculatively evaluate many potential…
Simulated annealing - moving from a tractable distribution to a distribution of interest via a sequence of intermediate distributions - has traditionally been used as an inexact method of handling isolated modes in Markov chain samplers.…
Transition path theory (TPT) for diffusion processes is a framework for analysing the transitions of multiscale ergodic diffusion processes between disjoint metastable subsets of state space. Most methods for applying TPT involve the…
The identification of parameters in mathematical models using noisy observations is a common task in uncertainty quantification. We employ the framework of Bayesian inversion: we combine monitoring and observational data with prior…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are sampling methods that have become a commonly used tool in statistics, for example to perform Monte Carlo integration. As a consequence of the increase in computational power, many variations of…
In this article we propose a novel MCMC method based on deterministic transformations T: X x D --> X where X is the state-space and D is some set which may or may not be a subset of X. We refer to our new methodology as Transformation-based…
In the field of sampling algorithms, MCMC (Markov Chain Monte Carlo) methods are widely used when direct sampling is not possible. However, multimodality of target distributions often leads to slow convergence and mixing. One common…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods to sample from a probability distribution $\pi$ defined on a space $(\Theta,\mathcal{T})$ consist of the simulation of realisations of Markov chains $\{\theta_{n},n\geq1\}$ of invariant distribution…
MCMC methods (Monte Carlo Markov Chain) are a class of methods used to perform simulations per a probability distribution $P$. These methods are often used when we have difficulties to directly sample per a given probability distribution…
The normalizing constant plays an important role in Bayesian computation, and there is a large literature on methods for computing or approximating normalizing constants that cannot be evaluated in closed form. When the normalizing constant…
A key limitation of sampling algorithms for approximate inference is that it is difficult to quantify their approximation error. Widely used sampling schemes, such as sequential importance sampling with resampling and Metropolis-Hastings,…
Parallel tempering Monte Carlo has proven to be an efficient method in optimization and sampling applications. Having an optimized temperature set enhances the efficiency of the algorithm through more-frequent replica visits to the…
We derive a parallel sampling algorithm for computational inverse problems that present an unknown linear forcing term and a vector of nonlinear parameters to be recovered. It is assumed that the data is noisy and that the linear part of…
Multimodal structures in the sampling density (e.g. two competing phases) can be a serious problem for traditional Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), because correct sampling of the different structures can only be guaranteed for infinite…
Integration over non-negative integrands is a central problem in machine learning (e.g. for model averaging, (hyper-)parameter marginalisation, and computing posterior predictive distributions). Bayesian Quadrature is a probabilistic…
Recent developments in big data and analytics research have produced an abundance of large data sets that are too big to be analyzed in their entirety, due to limits on computer memory or storage capacity. To address these issues,…