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Monte Carlo methods represent the "de facto" standard for approximating complicated integrals involving multidimensional target distributions. In order to generate random realizations from the target distribution, Monte Carlo techniques use…

Computation · Statistics 2022-01-21 L. Martino , V. Elvira , D. Luengo , J. Corander

Markov-chain Monte Carlo sampling has become a standard technique for exploring the posterior distribution of cosmological parameters constrained by observations of CMB anisotropies. Given an infinite amount of time, any MCMC sampler will…

Astrophysics · Physics 2007-05-23 Anze Slosar , Michael Hobson

We introduce a new framework for efficient sampling from complex probability distributions, using a combination of optimal transport maps and the Metropolis-Hastings rule. The core idea is to use continuous transportation to transform…

Computation · Statistics 2019-06-11 Matthew Parno , Youssef Marzouk

We present a novel Bayesian inference tool that uses a neural network to parameterise efficient Markov Chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC) proposals. The target distribution is first transformed into a diagonal, unit variance Gaussian by a series of…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2020-06-03 Adam Moss

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have not been broadly adopted in Bayesian neural networks (BNNs). This paper initially reviews the main challenges in sampling from the parameter posterior of a neural network via MCMC. Such…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-10-05 Theodore Papamarkou , Jacob Hinkle , M. Todd Young , David Womble

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…

Computation · Statistics 2021-05-27 Peter L Green , Robert E Moore , Ryan J Jackson , Jinglai Li , Simon Maskell

We explore a general framework in Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling where sequential proposals are tried as a candidate for the next state of the Markov chain. This sequential-proposal framework can be applied to various existing…

Computation · Statistics 2019-08-21 Joonha Park , Yves F. Atchadé

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are indispensable when sampling from a complex, high-dimensional distribution by a conventional method is intractable. Even though MCMC is a powerful tool, it is also hard to control and tune in…

Graphics · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Sascha Holl , Gurprit Singh , Hans-Peter Seidel

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a well-established family of algorithms primarily used in Bayesian statistics to sample from a target distribution when direct sampling is challenging. Existing work on Bayesian decision trees uses MCMC.…

Computation · Statistics 2023-01-24 Efthyvoulos Drousiotis , Paul G. Spirakis , Simon Maskell

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are ubiquitous tools for simulation-based inference in many fields but designing and identifying good MCMC samplers is still an open question. This paper introduces a novel MCMC algorithm, namely,…

Bayesian analysis is widely used in science and engineering for real-time forecasting, decision making, and to help unravel the processes that explain the observed data. These data are some deterministic and/or stochastic transformations of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-02-24 Jiangjiang Zhang , Jasper A. Vrugt , Xiaoqing Shi , Guang Lin , Lingzao Zeng , Laosheng Wu

Continuous normalizing flows (CNFs) learn the probability path between a reference distribution and a target distribution by modeling the vector field generating said path using neural networks. Recently, Lipman et al. (2022) introduced a…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-10-29 Alberto Cabezas , Louis Sharrock , Christopher Nemeth

Reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo (RJMCMC) proposals that achieve reasonable acceptance rates and mixing are notoriously difficult to design in most applications. Inspired by recent advances in deep neural network-based normalizing…

Computation · Statistics 2023-02-28 Laurence Davies , Robert Salomone , Matthew Sutton , Christopher Drovandi

In this paper, we address the challenge of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms within the approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) framework, which often get trapped in local optima due to their inherent local exploration mechanism. We…

Computation · Statistics 2025-12-16 Xuefei Cao , Shijia Wang , Yongdao Zhou

One of the most widely used samplers in practice is the component-wise Metropolis-Hastings (CMH) sampler that updates in turn the components of a vector valued Markov chain using accept-reject moves generated from a proposal distribution.…

Computation · Statistics 2017-03-22 Jinyoung Yang , Evgeny Levi , Radu V. Craiu , Jeffrey S. Rosenthal

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods to sample from a probability distribution $\pi$ defined on a space $(\Theta,\mathcal{T})$ consist of the simulation of realisations of Markov chains $\{\theta_{n},n\geq1\}$ of invariant distribution…

Computation · Statistics 2021-01-06 Christophe Andrieu , Sinan Yıldırım , Arnaud Doucet , Nicolas Chopin

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…

Computation · Statistics 2025-02-06 Wei Yuan , Guanyang Wang

We propose new Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms to sample probability distributions on submanifolds, which generalize previous methods by allowing the use of set-valued maps in the proposal step of the MCMC algorithms. The motivation for…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2021-10-07 Tony Lelièvre , Gabriel Stoltz , Wei Zhang

Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC), or particle filtering, is a popular class of methods for sampling from an intractable target distribution using a sequence of simpler intermediate distributions. Like other importance sampling-based methods,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-11-18 Shixiang Gu , Zoubin Ghahramani , Richard E. Turner

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…

Computation · Statistics 2020-05-12 Samuel Livingstone , Giacomo Zanella