Related papers: Stein Point Markov Chain Monte Carlo
An important task in computational statistics and machine learning is to approximate a posterior distribution $p(x)$ with an empirical measure supported on a set of representative points $\{x_i\}_{i=1}^n$. This paper focuses on methods…
To improve the efficiency of Monte Carlo estimation, practitioners are turning to biased Markov chain Monte Carlo procedures that trade off asymptotic exactness for computational speed. The reasoning is sound: a reduction in variance due to…
Stein's method compares probability distributions through the study of a class of linear operators called Stein operators. While mainly studied in probability and used to underpin theoretical statistics, Stein's method has led to…
Stein discrepancies have emerged as a powerful tool for retrospective improvement of Markov chain Monte Carlo output. However, the question of how to design Markov chains that are well-suited to such post-processing has yet to be addressed.…
The use of heuristics to assess the convergence and compress the output of Markov chain Monte Carlo can be sub-optimal in terms of the empirical approximations that are produced. Typically a number of the initial states are attributed to…
Stochastic gradient methods are the workhorse (algorithms) of large-scale optimization problems in machine learning, signal processing, and other computational sciences and engineering. This paper studies Markov chain gradient descent, a…
Stochastic approximation methods play a central role in maximum likelihood estimation problems involving intractable likelihood functions, such as marginal likelihoods arising in problems with missing or incomplete data, and in parametric…
Stein thinning is a promising algorithm proposed by (Riabiz et al., 2022) for post-processing outputs of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). The main principle is to greedily minimize the kernelized Stein discrepancy (KSD), which only requires…
Markov chains are fundamental models for stochastic dynamics, with applications in a wide range of areas such as population dynamics, queueing systems, reinforcement learning, and Monte Carlo methods. Estimating the transition matrix and…
Stein importance sampling is a widely applicable technique based on kernelized Stein discrepancy, which corrects the output of approximate sampling algorithms by reweighting the empirical distribution of the samples. A general analysis of…
Markov chain Monte Carlo is a class of algorithms for drawing Markovian samples from high-dimensional target densities to approximate the numerical integration associated with computing statistical expectation, especially in Bayesian…
Gradient information on the sampling distribution can be used to reduce the variance of Monte Carlo estimators via Stein's method. An important application is that of estimating an expectation of a test function along the sample path of a…
We study an approximation method of stationary characters of a two-dimensional Markov chain via the Stein method. For this purpose, innovative methods are developed to estimate the moments of the Markov chain, as well as the solution to the…
We consider chance-constrained problems with discrete random distribution. We aim for problems with a large number of scenarios. We propose a novel method based on the stochastic gradient descent method which performs updates of the…
We propose a Monte Carlo algorithm to sample from high dimensional probability distributions that combines Markov chain Monte Carlo and importance sampling. We provide a careful theoretical analysis, including guarantees on robustness to…
Markov chain Monte Carlo methods are often deemed too computationally intensive to be of any practical use for big data applications, and in particular for inference on datasets containing a large number $n$ of individual data points, also…
Monte Carlo algorithms often aim to draw from a distribution $\pi$ by simulating a Markov chain with transition kernel $P$ such that $\pi$ is invariant under $P$. However, there are many situations for which it is impractical or impossible…
We develop a new bidirectional algorithm for estimating Markov chain multi-step transition probabilities: given a Markov chain, we want to estimate the probability of hitting a given target state in $\ell$ steps after starting from a given…
Message-Passing Monte Carlo (MPMC) was recently introduced as a novel low-discrepancy sampling approach leveraging tools from geometric deep learning. While originally designed for generating uniform point sets, we extend this framework to…
Bisimulation metrics are powerful tools for measuring similarities between stochastic processes, and specifically Markov chains. Recent advances have uncovered that bisimulation metrics are, in fact, optimal-transport distances, which has…