Related papers: Finding optimal solutions by stochastic cellular a…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are simple and extremely powerful techniques to sample from almost arbitrary distributions. The flaw in practice is that it can take a large and/or unknown amount of time to converge to the…
We here consider the subset simulation method which approaches a failure event using a decreasing sequence of nested intermediate failure events. The method resembles importance sampling, which actively explores a probability space by…
Sequential Monte Carlo methods, also known as particle methods, are a popular set of techniques for approximating high-dimensional probability distributions and their normalizing constants. These methods have found numerous applications in…
We prove bounds on the variance of a function $f$ under the empirical measure of the samples obtained by the Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithm, with time complexity depending on local rather than global Markov chain mixing dynamics.…
We design and implement a novel algorithm for computing a multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) estimator of the cumulative distribution function of a quantity of interest in problems with random input parameters or initial conditions. Our approach…
There has been considerable interest in making Bayesian inference more scalable. In big data settings, most literature focuses on reducing the computing time per iteration, with less focused on reducing the number of iterations needed in…
We present a Monte Carlo method that efficiently computes the density of states for spin models having any number of interaction per spin. By combining a random-walk in the energy space with collective updates controlled by the…
The generalized extreme value (GEV) distribution is a popular model for analyzing and forecasting extreme weather data. To increase prediction accuracy, spatial information is often pooled via a latent Gaussian process (GP) on the GEV…
We describe a general strategy for sampling configurations from a given distribution, NOT based on the standard Metropolis (Markov chain) strategy. It uses the fact that nontrivial problems in statistical physics are high dimensional and…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a powerful tool for Bayesian statistical inference due to its potential to rapidly explore high dimensional state space, avoiding the random walk behavior typical of many Markov Chain Monte Carlo samplers.…
We consider probabilistic model checking for continuous-time Markov chains (CTMCs) induced from Stochastic Reaction Networks (SRNs) against a fragment of Continuous Stochastic Logic (CSL) extended with reward operators. Classical numerical…
Gaussian Markov random fields (GMRFs) are popular for modeling dependence in large areal datasets due to their ease of interpretation and computational convenience afforded by the sparse precision matrices needed for random variable…
Delayed-acceptance Markov chain Monte Carlo (DA-MCMC) samples from a probability distribution via a two-stages version of the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm, by combining the target distribution with a "surrogate" (i.e. an approximate and…
State space models (SSMs) are widely used to describe dynamic systems. However, when the likelihood of the observations is intractable, parameter inference for SSMs cannot be easily carried out using standard Markov chain Monte Carlo or…
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…
The problem of sampling constrained continuous distributions has frequently appeared in many machine/statistical learning models. Many Monte Carlo Markov Chain (MCMC) sampling methods have been adapted to handle different types of…
Switching dynamical systems are an expressive model class for the analysis of time-series data. As in many fields within the natural and engineering sciences, the systems under study typically evolve continuously in time, it is natural to…
Sequential Monte Carlo algorithms (also known as particle filters) are popular methods to approximate filtering (and related) distributions of state-space models. However, they converge at the slow $1/\sqrt{N}$ rate, which may be an issue…
As it has become common to use many computer cores in routine applications, finding good ways to parallelize popular algorithms has become increasingly important. In this paper, we present a parallelization scheme for Markov chain Monte…
Markov-chain Monte Carlo sampling has become a standard technique for exploring the posterior distribution of cosmological parameters constrained by observations of CMB anisotropies. Given an infinite amount of time, any MCMC sampler will…