Related papers: Estimating Monte Carlo variance from multiple Mark…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is one of the main workhorses of probabilistic inference, but it is notoriously hard to measure the quality of approximate posterior samples. This challenge is particularly salient in black box inference…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling is computationally expensive, especially for complex models. Alternative methods make simplifying assumptions about the posterior to reduce computational burden, but their impact on predictive…

Stochastic gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (SG-MCMC) has been developed as a flexible family of scalable Bayesian sampling algorithms. However, there has been little theoretical analysis of the impact of minibatch size to the algorithm's…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Variational Bayes (VB) is a popular tool for Bayesian inference in statistical modeling. Recently, some VB algorithms are proposed to handle intractable likelihoods with applications such as approximate Bayesian computation. In this paper,…

By facilitating the generation of samples from arbitrary probability distributions, Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is, arguably, \emph{the} tool for the evaluation of Bayesian inference problems that yield non-standard posterior…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are simple and extremely powerful techniques to sample from almost arbitrary distributions. The flaw in practice is that it can take a large and/or unknown amount of time to converge to the…

We consider the problem of estimating expectations with respect to a target distribution with an unknown normalizing constant, and where even the unnormalized target needs to be approximated at finite resolution. Under such an assumption,…

There is a tension between robustness and efficiency when designing Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling algorithms. Here we focus on robustness with respect to tuning parameters, showing that more sophisticated algorithms tend to be…

This work introduces a novel multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) metamodeling approach for variance function estimation. Although devising an efficient experimental design for simulation metamodeling can be elusive, the MLMC-based approach…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling is an important and commonly used tool for the analysis of hierarchical models. Nevertheless, practitioners generally have two options for MCMC: utilize existing software that generates a black-box…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are widely used to sample from complicated distributions, especially to sample from the posterior distribution in Bayesian inference. However, MCMC is not directly applicable when facing the doubly…

The trace of a matrix function f(A), most notably of the matrix inverse, can be estimated stochastically using samples< x,f(A)x> if the components of the random vectors x obey an appropriate probability distribution. However such a…

Monte Carlo (MC) sampling is a popular method for estimating the statistics (e.g. expectation and variance) of a random variable. Its slow convergence has led to the emergence of advanced techniques to reduce the variance of the MC…

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…

We demonstrate the use of a variational method to determine a quantitative lower bound on the rate of convergence of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms as a function of the target density and proposal density. The bound relies on…