Related papers: A splitting method to reduce MCMC variance
Nested Monte Carlo is widely used for risk estimation, but its efficiency is limited by the discontinuity of the indicator function and high computational cost. This paper proposes a nested Multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) method combined with…
Nested integration problems arise in various scientific and engineering applications, including Bayesian experimental design, financial risk assessment, and uncertainty quantification. These nested integrals take the form $\int f\left(\int…
Markov chain Monte Carlo samplers produce dependent streams of variates drawn from the limiting distribution of the Markov chain. With this as motivation, we introduce novel univariate kernel density estimators which are appropriate for the…
Importance sampling has been known as a powerful tool to reduce the variance of Monte Carlo estimator for rare event simulation. Based on the criterion of minimizing the variance of Monte Carlo estimator within a parametric family, we…
Many Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods leverage gradient information of the potential function of target distribution to explore sample space efficiently. However, computing gradients can often be computationally expensive for large…
It is widely known that the performance of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) can degrade quickly when targeting computationally expensive posterior distributions, such as when the sample size is large. This has motivated the search for MCMC…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) has emerged as a powerful Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method to sample from complex continuous distributions. However, a fundamental limitation of HMC is that it can not be applied to distributions with…
Many machine learning problems involve Monte Carlo gradient estimators. As a prominent example, we focus on Monte Carlo variational inference (MCVI) in this paper. The performance of MCVI crucially depends on the variance of its stochastic…
Variable selection is a key issue when analyzing high-dimensional data. The explosion of data with large sample sizes and dimensionality brings new challenges to this problem in both inference accuracy and computational complexity. To…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are algorithms for sampling probability distributions, commonly applied to the Boltzmann distribution in physical and chemical models such as protein folding and the Ising model. These methods enable…
Markov chain Monte Calro methods (MCMC) are commonly used in Bayesian statistics. In the last twenty years, many results have been established for the calculation of the exact convergence rate of MCMC methods. We introduce another rate of…
We consider the problem of estimating the measure of subsets in very large networks. A prime tool for this purpose is the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm. This algorithm, while extremely useful in many cases, still often suffers…
We introduce a new algorithm for approximate inference that combines reparametrization, Markov chain Monte Carlo and variational methods. We construct a very flexible implicit variational distribution synthesized by an arbitrary Markov…
We investigate the properties of a sequential Monte Carlo method where the particle weight that appears in the algorithm is estimated by a positive, unbiased estimator. We present broadly-applicable convergence results, including a central…
We propose approaches for testing implementations of Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods as well as of general Monte Carlo methods. Based on statistical hypothesis tests, these approaches can be used in a unit testing framework to, for…
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…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a powerful Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method for performing approximate inference in complex probabilistic models of continuous variables. In common with many MCMC methods, however, the standard HMC…
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…
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…
Recent advances in stochastic gradient variational inference have made it possible to perform variational Bayesian inference with posterior approximations containing auxiliary random variables. This enables us to explore a new synthesis of…