English
Related papers

Related papers: No Free Lunch for Approximate MCMC

200 papers

To sample from a given target distribution, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling relies on constructing an ergodic Markov chain with the target distribution as its invariant measure. For any MCMC method, an important question is how to…

Probability · Mathematics 2023-08-15 Federica Milinanni , Pierre Nyquist

Bayesian computation crucially relies on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. In the case of massive data sets, running the Metropolis-Hastings sampler to draw from the posterior distribution becomes prohibitive due to the large…

Computation · Statistics 2015-12-07 Roberto Casarin , Radu V. Craiu , Fabrizio Leisen

Statisticians often use Monte Carlo methods to approximate probability distributions, primarily with Markov chain Monte Carlo and importance sampling. Sequential Monte Carlo samplers are a class of algorithms that combine both techniques to…

Computation · Statistics 2022-06-20 Chenguang Dai , Jeremy Heng , Pierre E. Jacob , Nick Whiteley

Thompson sampling for multi-armed bandit problems is known to enjoy favorable performance in both theory and practice. However, it suffers from a significant limitation computationally, arising from the need for samples from posterior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-19 Eric Mazumdar , Aldo Pacchiano , Yi-an Ma , Peter L. Bartlett , Michael I. Jordan

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods require a large number of samples to approximate a posterior distribution, which can be costly when the likelihood or prior is expensive to evaluate. The number of samples can be reduced if we can…

Computation · Statistics 2019-08-06 V. Roshan Joseph , Dianpeng Wang , Li Gu , Shiji Lv , Rui Tuo

We analyse a multilevel Monte Carlo method for the approximation of distribution functions of univariate random variables. Since, by assumption, the target distribution is not known explicitly, approximations have to be used. We provide an…

Probability · Mathematics 2017-06-22 Mike B. Giles , Tigran Nagapetyan , Klaus Ritter

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

We consider the efficient use of an approximation within Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), with subsequent importance sampling (IS) correction of the Markov chain inexact output, leading to asymptotically exact inference. We detail…

Computation · Statistics 2019-04-15 Jordan Franks

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques are now widely used for cosmological parameter estimation. Chains are generated to sample the posterior probability distribution obtained following the Bayesian approach. An important issue is how…

Stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms have received much attention in Bayesian computing for big data problems, but they are only applicable to a small class of problems for which the parameter space has a fixed…

Computation · Statistics 2020-02-10 Qifan Song , Yan Sun , Mao Ye , Faming Liang

Sampling from posterior distributions using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods can require an exhaustive number of iterations, particularly when the posterior is multi-modal as the MCMC sampler can become trapped in a local mode for a…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-10-30 Christopher Nemeth , Fredrik Lindsten , Maurizio Filippone , James Hensman

This work presents an efficient approach for accelerating multilevel Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling for large-scale problems using low-fidelity machine learning models. While conventional techniques for large-scale Bayesian…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-21 Sohail Reddy , Hillary Fairbanks

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a powerful tool for sampling from complex probability distributions. Despite its versatility, MCMC often suffers from strong autocorrelation and the negative sign problem, leading to slowing down the…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2024-12-05 Synge Todo

Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) is a methodology for sampling approximately from a sequence of probability distributions of increasing dimension and estimating their normalizing constants. We propose here an alternative methodology named…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2012-11-13 Anthony Brockwell , Pierre Del Moral , Arnaud Doucet

We show that for any multiple-try Metropolis algorithm, one can always accept the proposal and evaluate the importance weight that is needed to correct for the bias without extra computational cost. This results in a general, convenient,…

Computation · Statistics 2024-10-03 Guanxun Li , Aaron Smith , Quan Zhou

We consider the computation of the permanent of a binary n by n matrix. It is well- known that the exact computation is a #P complete problem. A variety of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) computational algorithms have been introduced in the…

Computation · Statistics 2013-05-30 Ajay Jasra , Junshan Wang

Inferring directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) from data via Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is computationally challenging in moderate-to-high dimensional settings because their discrete sampling space grows super-exponentially with the number…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-14 Morris Greenberg , Kieran R Campbell , Radu Craiu

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

Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) provide a promising framework for modeling predictive uncertainty and enhancing out-of-distribution robustness (OOD) by estimating the posterior distribution of network parameters. Stochastic Gradient Markov…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Hyunsu Kim , Giung Nam , Chulhee Yun , Hongseok Yang , Juho Lee

In this article we consider computing expectations w.r.t.~probability laws associated to a certain class of stochastic systems. In order to achieve such a task, one must not only resort to numerical approximation of the expectation, but…

Computation · Statistics 2017-10-30 Ajay Jasra , Kengo Kamatani , Kody Law , Yan Zhou