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Shapley values are among the most popular tools for explaining predictions of blackbox machine learning models. However, their high computational cost motivates the use of sampling approximations, inducing a considerable degree of…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have become a cornerstone of many modern scientific analyses by providing a straightforward approach to numerically estimate uncertainties in the parameters of a model using a sequence of random…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) has transformed Bayesian model inference over the past three decades: mainly because of this, Bayesian inference is now a workhorse of applied scientists. Under general conditions, MCMC sampling converges…

In this paper we propose and study a family of continuous wavelets on general domains, and a corresponding stochastic discretization that we call Monte Carlo wavelets. First, using tools from the theory of reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces…

Multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) is a recently proposed variation of Monte Carlo (MC) simulation that achieves variance reduction by simulating the governing equations on a series of spatial (or temporal) grids with increasing resolution.…

Population Monte Carlo has been introduced as a sequential importance sampling technique to overcome poor fit of the importance function. In this paper, we compare the performances of the original Population Monte Carlo algorithm with a…

Zero-variance control variates (ZV-CV) are a post-processing method to reduce the variance of Monte Carlo estimators of expectations using the derivatives of the log target. Once the derivatives are available, the only additional…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are used to estimate features of interest of a distribution. The Monte Carlo error in estimation has an asymptotic normal distribution whose multivariate nature has so far been ignored in the MCMC…

Many machine learning problems involve Monte Carlo gradient estimators. As a prominent example, we focus on Monte Carlo variational inference (MCVI) in this paper. The performance of MCVI crucially depends on the variance of its stochastic…

In this paper we present a new approach to control variates for improving computational efficiency of Ensemble Monte Carlo. We present the approach using simulation of paths of a time-dependent nonlinear stochastic equation. The core idea…

A common tool in the practice of Markov Chain Monte Carlo is to use approximating transition kernels to speed up computation when the desired kernel is slow to evaluate or intractable. A limited set of quantitative tools exist to assess the…

In general, the statistical simulation approaches are referred to as the Monte Carlo methods as a whole. The broad class of the Monte Carlo methods involves the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques that attract the attention of…

We propose approaches for testing implementations of Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods as well as of general Monte Carlo methods. Based on statistical hypothesis tests, these approaches can be used in a unit testing framework to, for…

We consider quantile estimation using Markov chain Monte Carlo and establish conditions under which the sampling distribution of the Monte Carlo error is approximately Normal. Further, we investigate techniques to estimate the associated…

Using Markov chain Monte Carlo to sample from posterior distributions was the key innovation which made Bayesian data analysis practical. Notoriously, however, MCMC is hard to tune, hard to diagnose, and hard to parallelize. This…

Flexible variational distributions improve variational inference but are harder to optimize. In this work we present a control variate that is applicable for any reparameterizable distribution with known mean and covariance matrix, e.g.…

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…

We propose a novel framework of estimating systemic risk measures and risk allocations based on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. We consider a class of allocations whose jth component can be written as some risk measure of the jth…

In this paper we derive control charts for the variance of a Gaussian process using the likelihood ratio approach, the generalized likelihood ratio approach, the sequential probability ratio method and a generalized sequential probability…

We prove finite sample complexities for sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithms which require only local mixing times of the associated Markov kernels. Our bounds are particularly useful when the target distribution is multimodal and global…