Related papers: MCMC Confidence Intervals and Biases
This short note argues that 95% confidence intervals for MCMC estimates can be obtained even without establishing a CLT, by multiplying their widths by 2.3.
The batch means estimator of the MCMC variance is a simple and effective measure of accuracy for MCMC based ergodic averages. Under various regularity conditions, the estimator has been shown to be consistent for the true variance. However,…
In this work, we show that uniform integrability is not a necessary condition for central limit theorems (CLT) to hold for normalized multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) estimators and we provide near optimal weaker conditions under which the CLT…
We propose and study three confidence intervals (CIs) centered at an estimator that is intentionally biased to reduce mean squared error. The first CI simply uses an unbiased estimator's standard error; compared to centering at the unbiased…
Standard confidence intervals employed in applied statistical analysis are usually based on asymptotic approximations. Such approximations can be considerably inaccurate in small and moderate sized samples. We derive accurate confidence…
We assume a drift condition towards a small set and bound the mean square error of estimators obtained by taking averages along a single trajectory of a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm. We use these bounds to construct fixed-width…
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…
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…
Interest is in evaluating, by Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation, the expected value of a function with respect to a, possibly unnormalized, probability distribution. A general purpose variance reduction technique for the MCMC…
Confidence intervals based on the central limit theorem (CLT) are a cornerstone of classical statistics. Despite being only asymptotically valid, they are ubiquitous because they permit statistical inference under weak assumptions and can…
In this paper, we aim at estimating the quarticity of continuous It\^{o} semimartingales. Instead of using some classical estimators, we introduce a more intuitive one and establish a central limit theorem (CLT) for it, with a convergence…
Some recent work on confidence intervals for randomized quasi-Monte Carlo (RQMC) sampling found a surprising result: ordinary Student $t$ 95% confidence intervals based on a modest number of replicates were seen to be very effective and…
The "typical" asymptotic behavior of the weighted sums of independent random vectors in $k$-dimensional space is considered. It is shown that in this case the rate of convergence in the multivariate central limit theorem is of order…
We consider the problem of estimating the mean of a normal distribution under the following constraint: the estimator can access only a single bit from each sample from this distribution. We study the squared error risk in this estimation…
We address the problem of upper bounding the mean square error of MCMC estimators. Our analysis is nonasymptotic. We first establish a general result valid for essentially all ergodic Markov chains encountered in Bayesian computation and a…
This paper addresses the key challenge of estimating the asymptotic covariance associated with the Markov chain central limit theorem, which is essential for visualizing and terminating Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulations. We focus…
We study the fundamental problem of estimating the mean of a $d$-dimensional distribution with covariance $\Sigma \preccurlyeq \sigma^2 I_d$ given $n$ samples. When $d = 1$, \cite{catoni} showed an estimator with error $(1+o(1)) \cdot…
The purpose of the present paper is to assess the efficacy of confidence intervals for Rosenthal's fail-safe number. Although Rosenthal's estimator is highly used by researchers, its statistical properties are largely unexplored. First of…
This article considers the popular MCMC method of unadjusted Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC) and provides a non-asymptotic analysis of its sampling error in 2-Wasserstein distance. The proof is based on a refinement of mean-square analysis in Li…
We provide estimates of the rate of strong approximation and bounds for probabilities of moderate deviations in the CLT for the $L_1$-norm of the kernel density estimator without any assumptions on the density and assuming that the kernel…