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Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a powerful method for drawing samples from non-standard probability distributions and is utilized across many fields and disciplines. Methods such as Metropolis-Adjusted Langevin (MALA) and Hamiltonian…

Hybrid Monte Carlo is a powerful Markov Chain Monte Carlo method for sampling from complex continuous distributions. However, a major limitation of HMC is its inability to be applied to discrete domains due to the lack of gradient signal.…

We propose a generic Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm to speed up computations for datasets with many observations. A key feature of our approach is the use of the highly efficient difference estimator from the survey sampling…

Approximating complex probability densities is a core problem in modern statistics. In this paper, we introduce the concept of Variational Inference (VI), a popular method in machine learning that uses optimization techniques to estimate…

We present a new framework to derandomise certain Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. As in MCMC, we first reduce counting problems to sampling from a sequence of marginal distributions. For the latter task, we introduce a method…

Variational inference methods have been shown to lead to significant improvements in the computational efficiency of approximate Bayesian inference in mixed multinomial logit models when compared to standard Markov-chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)…

In sampling tasks, it is common for target distributions to be known up to a normalizing constant. However, in many situations, even evaluating the unnormalized distribution can be costly or infeasible. This issue arises in scenarios such…

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…

Monte Carlo (MC) methods are widely used for Bayesian inference and optimization in statistics, signal processing and machine learning. A well-known class of MC methods are Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. In order to foster…

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,…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a widely used sampling method in modern artificial intelligence and probabilistic computing systems. It involves repetitive random number generations and thus often dominates the latency of probabilistic…

Constructing unbiased estimators from Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) outputs is a difficult problem that has recently received a lot of attention in the statistics and machine learning communities. However, the current unbiased MCMC…

Variational inference has recently emerged as a popular alternative to the classical Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) in large-scale Bayesian inference. The core idea is to trade statistical accuracy for computational efficiency. In this…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is widely regarded as one of the most important algorithms of the 20th century. Its guarantees of asymptotic convergence, stability, and estimator-variance bounds using only unnormalized probability functions…

We propose Subsampling MCMC, a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) framework where the likelihood function for $n$ observations is estimated from a random subset of $m$ observations. We introduce a highly efficient unbiased estimator of the…

Leaving posterior sensitivity concerns aside, non-identifiability of the parameters does not raise a difficulty for Bayesian inference as far as the posterior is proper, but multi-modality or flat regions of the posterior induced by the…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is the predominant tool used in Bayesian parameter estimation for hierarchical models. When the model expands due to an increasing number of hierarchical levels, number of groups at a particular level, or…

A standard way to move particles in a SMC sampler is to apply several steps of a MCMC (Markov chain Monte Carlo) kernel. Unfortunately, it is not clear how many steps need to be performed for optimal performance. In addition, the output of…

We propose a very fast approximate Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling framework that is applicable to a large class of sparse Bayesian inference problems, where the computational cost per iteration in several models is of order…

In this paper we build on previous work which uses inferences techniques, in particular Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, to solve parameterized control problems. We propose a number of modifications in order to make this approach…