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We present a novel control variate technique for enhancing the efficiency of Monte Carlo (MC) estimation of expectations involving solutions to stochastic differential equations (SDEs). Our method integrates a primary fine-time-step…

Probability · Mathematics 2025-11-12 Josselin Garnier , Laurent Mertz

In light transport simulation, Markov chain Monte Carlo methods are particularly effective at exploring regions with complex lighting characteristics. However, estimator variance is a central concern across Monte Carlo methods in general.…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Sascha Holl , Gurprit Singh , Hans-Peter Seidel

We wish to compute the gradient of an expectation over a finite or countably infinite sample space having $K \leq \infty$ categories. When $K$ is indeed infinite, or finite but very large, the relevant summation is intractable. Accordingly,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-05-14 Runjing Liu , Jeffrey Regier , Nilesh Tripuraneni , Michael I. Jordan , Jon McAuliffe

MCMC methods (Monte Carlo Markov Chain) are a class of methods used to perform simulations per a probability distribution $P$. These methods are often used when we have difficulties to directly sample per a given probability distribution…

Methodology · Statistics 2014-01-21 Papa Ngom , Badiassiatta Don Bosco Diatta

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is the engine of modern Bayesian statistics, being used to approximate the posterior and derived quantities of interest. Despite this, the issue of how the output from a Markov chain is post-processed and…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-09-07 Leah F. South , Marina Riabiz , Onur Teymur , Chris. J. Oates

In statistics and machine learning, approximation of an intractable integration is often achieved by using the unbiased Monte Carlo estimator, but the variances of the estimation are generally high in many applications. Control variates…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-16 Ruosi Wan , Mingjun Zhong , Haoyi Xiong , Zhanxing Zhu

We propose cube thinning, a novel method for compressing the output of a MCMC (Markov chain Monte Carlo) algorithm when control variates are available. It amounts to resampling the initial MCMC sample (according to weights derived from…

Computation · Statistics 2021-09-01 Nicolas Chopin , Gabriel Ducrocq

Markov chain Monte Carlo is a widely-used technique for generating a dependent sequence of samples from complex distributions. Conventionally, these methods require a source of independent random variates. Most implementations use…

Computation · Statistics 2012-04-17 Iain Murray , Lloyd T. Elliott

We propose a new approach for estimating the finite dimensional transition matrix of a Markov chain using a large number of independent sample paths observed at random times. The sample paths may be observed as few as two times, and the…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-05-20 Daphne Aurouet , Valentin Patilea

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are a popular technique in Bayesian statistical modeling. They have long been used to obtain samples from posterior distributions, but recent research has focused on the scalability of these…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-02-02 Nicholas A. Johnson , Frank O. Kuehnel , Ali Nasiri Amini

It is well known that Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods scale poorly with dataset size. A popular class of methods for solving this issue is stochastic gradient MCMC. These methods use a noisy estimate of the gradient of the log…

Computation · Statistics 2017-12-15 Jack Baker , Paul Fearnhead , Emily B. Fox , Christopher Nemeth

We describe and analyze a variance reduction approach for Monte Carlo (MC) sampling that accelerates the estimation of statistics of computationally expensive simulation models using an ensemble of models with lower cost. These lower cost…

Computation · Statistics 2021-05-04 Alex A. Gorodetsky , Gianluca Geraci , Mike Eldred , John D. Jakeman

We propose a multilevel Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method for the Bayesian inference of random field parameters in PDEs using high-resolution data. Compared to existing multilevel MCMC methods, we additionally consider level-dependent…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-08-19 Pieter Vanmechelen , Geert Lombaert , Giovanni Samaey

Two popular classes of methods for approximate inference are Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and variational inference. MCMC tends to be accurate if run for a long enough time, while variational inference tends to give better approximations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-21 Justin Domke

In this paper we propose a novel and practical variance reduction approach for additive functionals of dependent sequences. Our approach combines the use of control variates with the minimisation of an empirical variance estimate. We…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-08-18 D. Belomestny , L. Iosipoi , E. Moulines , A. Naumov , S. Samsonov

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…

Probability · Mathematics 2024-10-01 Rocco Caprio , Adam M. Johansen

Markov chain Monte Carlo methods have become popular in statistics as versatile techniques to sample from complicated probability distributions. In this work, we propose a method to parameterize and train transition kernels of Markov chains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Evgenii Egorov , Ricardo Valperga , Efstratios Gavves

Neural control variates (NCVs) have emerged as a powerful tool for variance reduction in Monte Carlo (MC) simulations, particularly in high-dimensional problems where traditional control variates are difficult to construct analytically. By…

High Energy Physics - Lattice · Physics 2025-08-22 Hyunwoo Oh

We introduce a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method that is designed to sample from target distributions with irregular geometry using an adaptive scheme. In cases where targets exhibit non-Gaussian behaviour, we propose that adaption…

Computation · Statistics 2023-10-06 Ameer Dharamshi , Vivian Ngo , Jeffrey S. Rosenthal

We study a variance reduction strategy based on control variables for simulating the averaged macroscopic behavior of a stochastic slow-fast system. We assume that this averaged behavior can be written in terms of a few slow degrees of…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2016-09-16 Ward Melis , Giovanni Samaey