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Recent advances in stochastic gradient techniques have made it possible to estimate posterior distributions from large datasets via Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). However, when the target posterior is multimodal, mixing performance is…
We develop a Multi-Scale Merge-Split Markov chain on redistricting plans. The chain is designed to be usable as the proposal in a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm. Sampling the space of plans amounts to dividing a graph into a…
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…
Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods are not only a popular tool in the analysis of state space models, but offer an alternative to MCMC in situations where Bayesian inference must proceed via simulation. This paper introduces a new SMC…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods such as Gibbs sampling are finding widespread use in applied statistics and machine learning. These often lead to difficult computational problems, which are increasingly being solved on parallel and…
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…
Handling multimodality that commonly arises from complicated statistical models remains a challenge. Current Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methodology tackling this subject is based on an ensemble of chains targeting a product of…
We introduce Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms based on numerical approximations of piecewise-deterministic Markov processes obtained with the framework of splitting schemes. We present unadjusted as well as adjusted algorithms,…
Adaptive Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms, which automatically tune their parameters based on past samples, have proved extremely useful in practice. The self-tuning mechanism makes them `non-Markovian', which means that their…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are generally regarded as the gold standard technique for Bayesian inference. They are theoretically well-understood and conceptually simple to apply in practice. The drawback of MCMC is that in…
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…
To sample from a given target distribution, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling relies on constructing an ergodic Markov chain with the target distribution as its invariant measure. For any MCMC method, an important question is how to…
We propose an efficient Markov Chain Monte Carlo method for sampling equilibrium distributions for stochastic lattice models, capable of handling correctly long and short-range particle interactions. The proposed method is a Metropolis-type…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are often used in clustering since they guarantee asymptotically exact expectations in the infinite-time limit. In finite time, though, slow mixing often leads to poor performance. Modern computing…
Adaptive importance sampling (AIS) methods provide a useful alternative to Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms for performing inference of intractable distributions. Population Monte Carlo (PMC) algorithms constitute a family of AIS…
Probabilistic Logic Programming (PLP) languages enable programmers to specify systems that combine logical models with statistical knowledge. The inference problem, to determine the probability of query answers in PLP, is intractable in…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) has been progressively incorporated within the statistician's toolbox as an alternative sampling method in settings when standard Metropolis-Hastings is inefficient. HMC generates a Markov chain on an augmented…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are simulated by local exploration of complex statistical distributions, and while bypassing the cumbersome requirement of a specific analytical expression for the target, this stochastic exploration…
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…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) requires to evaluate the full data likelihood at different parameter values iteratively and is often computationally infeasible for large data sets. In this paper, we propose to approximate the log-likelihood…