English
Related papers

Related papers: No Free Lunch for Approximate MCMC

200 papers

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

Bayesian inference with Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is challenging when the likelihood function is irregular and expensive to compute. We explore several sampling algorithms that make use of subset evaluations to reduce computational…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-16 Conor Rosato , Harvinder Lehal , Simon Maskell , Lee Devlin , Malcolm Strens

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

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a flexible approach to approximate sampling from intractable probability distributions, with a rich theoretical foundation and comprising a wealth of exemplar algorithms. While the qualitative correctness…

Computation · Statistics 2025-11-27 Sam Power , Giorgos Vasdekis

Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms are used to simulate from complex statistical distributions by way of a local exploration of these distributions. This local feature avoids heavy requests on understanding the nature of the target, but it…

Computation · Statistics 2018-04-12 Christian P. Robert , Victor Elvira , Nick Tawn , Changye Wu

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-12-31 Matias Quiroz , Robert Kohn , Mattias Villani , Minh-Ngoc Tran

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…

High-dimensional data are routinely collected in many areas. We are particularly interested in Bayesian classification models in which one or more variables are imbalanced. Current Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms for posterior…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-01-15 Deborshee Sen , Matthias Sachs , Jianfeng Lu , David Dunson

Bayesian modelling and computational inference by Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a principled framework for large-scale uncertainty quantification, though is limited in practice by computational cost when implemented in the simplest…

Computation · Statistics 2020-09-21 Colin Fox , Tiangang Cui , Markus Neumayer

We consider posterior sampling in the very common Bayesian hierarchical model in which observed data depends on high-dimensional latent variables that, in turn, depend on relatively few hyperparameters. When the full conditional over the…

Computation · Statistics 2016-10-24 Richard A. Norton , J. Andres Christen , Colin Fox

Bayesian hierarchical modeling is a popular approach to capturing unobserved heterogeneity across individual units. However, standard estimation methods such as Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) can be impracticable for modeling outcomes from…

Methodology · Statistics 2014-11-04 Michael Braun , Paul Damien

Recently there have been exciting developments in Monte Carlo methods, with the development of new MCMC and sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithms which are based on continuous-time, rather than discrete-time, Markov processes. This has…

Computation · Statistics 2020-09-29 Paul Fearnhead , Joris Bierkens , Murray Pollock , Gareth O Roberts

The Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are popular when considering sampling from a high-dimensional random variable $\mathbf{x}$ with possibly unnormalised probability density $p$ and observed data $\mathbf{d}$. However, MCMC requires…

Computation · Statistics 2020-03-11 Haoyun Ying , Keheng Mao , Klaus Mosegaard

If the conclusion of a data analysis is sensitive to dropping very few data points, that conclusion might hinge on the particular data at hand rather than representing a more broadly applicable truth. How could we check whether this…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-11-12 Tin D. Nguyen , Ryan Giordano , Rachael Meager , Tamara Broderick

Monte Carlo algorithms simulate some prescribed number of samples, taking some random real time to complete the computations necessary. This work considers the converse: to impose a real-time budget on the computation, which results in the…

Computation · Statistics 2023-06-22 Lawrence M. Murray , Sumeetpal Singh , Anthony Lee

The problem of optimally scaling the proposal distribution in a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm is critical to the quality of the generated samples. Much work has gone into obtaining such results for various Metropolis-Hastings (MH)…

Computation · Statistics 2022-02-07 Sanket Agrawal , Dootika Vats , Krzysztof Łatuszyński , Gareth O. Roberts

The Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm is a widely recognised as an efficient method for sampling a specified posterior distribution. However, when the posterior is multi-modal, conventional MCMC algorithms either tend to become…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2014-08-19 Yi-Ming Hu , Martin Hendry , Ik Siong Heng

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…

Computation · Statistics 2021-08-17 Yves Atchadé , Liwei Wang

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 such as Gibbs sampling are finding widespread use in applied statistics and machine learning. These often lead to difficult computational problems, which are increasingly being solved on parallel and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-06-05 Alexander Terenin , Eric P. Xing