Related papers: Variance reduction for Markov chains with applicat…
This paper develops a flexible method for decreasing the variance of estimators for complex experiment effect metrics (e.g. ratio metrics) while retaining asymptotic unbiasedness. This method uses the auxiliary information about the…
In this paper we propose and discuss variance reduction techniques for the estimation of quantiles of the output of a complex model with random input parameters. These techniques are based on the use of a reduced model, such as a metamodel…
In this paper, we study the asymptotic variance of sample path averages for inhomogeneous Markov chains that evolve alternatingly according to two different $\pi$-reversible Markov transition kernels $P$ and $Q$. More specifically, our main…
We study a variation of vanilla stochastic gradient descent where the optimizer only has access to a Markovian sampling scheme. These schemes encompass applications that range from decentralized optimization with a random walker (token…
Variational inference in Bayesian deep learning often involves computing the gradient of an expectation that lacks a closed-form solution. In these cases, pathwise and score-function gradient estimators are the most common approaches. The…
We obtain necessary and sufficient conditions for the regular variation of the variance of partial sums of functionals of discrete and continuous-time stationary Markov processes with normal transition operators. We also construct a class…
Stochastic variational inference for collapsed models has recently been successfully applied to large scale topic modelling. In this paper, we propose a stochastic collapsed variational inference algorithm for hidden Markov models, in a…
In engineering examples, one often encounters the need to sample from unnormalized distributions with complex shapes that may also be implicitly defined through a physical or numerical simulation model, making it computationally expensive…
Continuous-time Markov chains with alarms (ACTMCs) allow for alarm events that can be non-exponentially distributed. Within parametric ACTMCs, the parameters of alarm-event distributions are not given explicitly and can be subject of…
Adaptive importance sampling for stochastic optimization is a promising approach that offers improved convergence through variance reduction. In this work, we propose a new framework for variance reduction that enables the use of mixtures…
Varying coefficient models (VCMs) are widely used for estimating nonlinear regression functions for functional data. Their Bayesian variants using Gaussian process priors on the functional coefficients, however, have received limited…
Exact approximations of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are a general emerging class of sampling algorithms. One of the main ideas behind exact approximations consists of replacing intractable quantities required to run standard…
We show that for any multiple-try Metropolis algorithm, one can always accept the proposal and evaluate the importance weight that is needed to correct for the bias without extra computational cost. This results in a general, convenient,…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are based on the construction of a Markov chain with transition probabilities leaving invariant a probability distribution of interest. In this work, we look at these transition probabilities as…
Finite element model updating is challenging because 1) the problem is oftentimes underdetermined while the measurements are limited and/or incomplete; 2) many combinations of parameters may yield responses that are similar with respect to…
In this paper we develop a general framework for constructing and analysing coupled Markov chain Monte Carlo samplers, allowing for both (possibly degenerate) diffusion and piecewise deterministic Markov processes. For many performance…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are powerful computational tools for analysis of complex statistical problems. However, their computational efficiency is highly dependent on the chosen proposal distribution, which is generally…
We consider the problem of performing inference with imprecise continuous-time hidden Markov chains, that is, imprecise continuous-time Markov chains that are augmented with random output variables whose distribution depends on the hidden…
In this article we consider computing expectations w.r.t.~probability laws associated to a certain class of stochastic systems. In order to achieve such a task, one must not only resort to numerical approximation of the expectation, but…
This paper considers a new approach to using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) in contexts where one may adopt multilevel (ML) Monte Carlo. The underlying problem is to approximate expectations w.r.t. an underlying probability measure that is…