Related papers: Jump Markov Chains and Rejection-Free Metropolis A…
Many applications in signal processing require the estimation of some parameters of interest given a set of observed data. More specifically, Bayesian inference needs the computation of {\it a-posteriori} estimators which are often…
We develop an Evolutionary Markov Chain Monte Carlo (EMCMC) algorithm for sampling spatial partitions that lie within a large and complex spatial state space. Our algorithm combines the advantages of evolutionary algorithms (EAs) as…
Metropolis-Hastings estimates intractable expectations - can differentiating the algorithm estimate their gradients? The challenge is that Metropolis-Hastings trajectories are not conventionally differentiable due to the discrete…
Scaling of proposals for Metropolis algorithms is an important practical problem in MCMC implementation. Criteria for scaling based on empirical acceptance rates of algorithms have been found to work consistently well across a broad range…
We construct a new Markov chain Monte Carlo method on finite states with optimal choices of acceptance-rejection ratio functions. We prove that the constructed continuous time Markov jumping process has a global in-time convergence rate in…
Markov chain Monte Carlo is an inherently serial algorithm. Although likelihood calculations for individual steps can sometimes be parallelized, the serial evolution of the process is widely viewed as incompatible with parallelization,…
A number of problems in a variety of fields are characterised by target distributions with a multimodal structure in which the presence of several isolated local maxima dramatically reduces the efficiency of Markov Chain Monte Carlo…
Monte Carlo (MC) sampling methods are widely applied in Bayesian inference, system simulation and optimization problems. The Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are a well-known class of MC methods which generate a Markov chain with…
The Metropolis algorithm is arguably the most fundamental Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method. But the algorithm is not guaranteed to converge to the desired distribution in the case of multivariate binary distributions (e.g., Ising…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are routinely used to draw samples from distributions with intractable normalization constants. However, standard MCMC algorithms do not apply to doubly-intractable distributions in which there are…
In the current work we present two generalizations of the Parallel Tempering algorithm, inspired by the so-called continuous-time Infinite Swapping algorithm. Such a method, found its origins in the molecular dynamics community, and can be…
Motivated by applications of distributed linear estimation, distributed control and distributed optimization, we consider the question of designing linear iterative algorithms for computing the average of numbers in a network. Specifically,…
The Metropolis-Hastings algorithm allows one to sample asymptotically from any probability distribution $\pi$. There has been recently much work devoted to the development of variants of the MH update which can handle scenarios where such…
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…
Bayesian curve fitting plays an important role in inverse problems, and is often addressed using the Reversible Jump Markov Chain Monte Carlo (RJMCMC) algorithm. However, this algorithm can be computationally inefficient without…
In this paper, we consider the implications of the fact that parallel raw-power can be exploited by a generic Metropolis--Hastings algorithm if the proposed values are independent. In particular, we present improvements to the independent…
In MCMC methods, such as the Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithm, the Gibbs sampler, or recent adaptive methods, many different strategies can be proposed, often associated in practice to unknown rates of convergence. In this paper we…
Traditional methods for unsupervised learning of finite mixture models require to evaluate the likelihood of all components of the mixture. This becomes computationally prohibitive when the number of components is large, as it is, for…
The classical Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithm can be extended to generate non-reversible Markov chains. This is achieved by means of a modification of the acceptance probability, using the notion of vorticity matrix. The resulting Markov…
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…