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We consider chance-constrained problems with discrete random distribution. We aim for problems with a large number of scenarios. We propose a novel method based on the stochastic gradient descent method which performs updates of the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-05-28 Lukáš Adam , Martin Branda

Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms are invaluable tools for exploring stationary properties of physical systems, especially in situations where direct sampling is unfeasible. Common implementations of Monte Carlo algorithms employ…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2016-04-27 Marija Vucelja

The present paper focuses on the problem of sampling from a given target distribution $\pi$ defined on some general state space. To this end, we introduce a novel class of non-reversible Markov chains, each chain being defined on an…

Computation · Statistics 2023-05-16 Randal Douc , Alain Durmus , Aurélien Enfroy , Jimmy Olsson

Markov chains are fundamental models for stochastic dynamics, with applications in a wide range of areas such as population dynamics, queueing systems, reinforcement learning, and Monte Carlo methods. Estimating the transition matrix and…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-01-26 Lasse Leskelä , Maximilien Dreveton

For a continuous-time Markov process, we characterize the law of the first jump location when started from an arbitrary initial distribution, in terms of the invariant distribution of an auxiliary Markov process. This could be of interest…

Probability · Mathematics 2019-08-23 Andi Q. Wang , David Steinsaltz

We demonstrate the use of a variational method to determine a quantitative lower bound on the rate of convergence of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms as a function of the target density and proposal density. The bound relies on…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2013-05-29 Fergal P. Casey , Joshua J. Waterfall , Ryan N. Gutenkunst , Christopher R. Myers , James P. Sethna

The Markov Chain Monte Carlo method is the dominant paradigm for posterior computation in Bayesian analysis. It is common to control computation time by making approximations to the Markov transition kernel. Comparatively little attention…

Computation · Statistics 2017-08-30 James E. Johndrow , Jonathan C. Mattingly , Sayan Mukherjee , David Dunson

Sampling from complicated probability distributions is a hard computational problem arising in many fields, including statistical physics, optimization, and machine learning. Quantum computers have recently been used to sample from…

We present a new Markov chain Monte Carlo method for estimating posterior probabilities of structural features in Bayesian networks. The method draws samples from the posterior distribution of partial orders on the nodes; for each sampled…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-02-20 Teppo Niinimaki , Pekka Parviainen , Mikko Koivisto

The Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) sampling algorithm exploits Hamiltonian dynamics to construct efficient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), which has become increasingly popular in machine learning and statistics. Since HMC uses the gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-04 Minghao Gu , Shiliang Sun

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…

Computation · Statistics 2015-05-20 Tim Salimans , Diederik P. Kingma , Max Welling

We propose a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm based on third-order Langevin dynamics for sampling from distributions with log-concave and smooth densities. The higher-order dynamics allow for more flexible discretization schemes,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-05-27 Wenlong Mou , Yi-An Ma , Martin J. Wainwright , Peter L. Bartlett , Michael I. Jordan

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 introduce Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms based on numerical approximations of piecewise-deterministic Markov processes obtained with the framework of splitting schemes. We present unadjusted as well as adjusted algorithms,…

Probability · Mathematics 2025-11-04 Andrea Bertazzi , Paul Dobson , Pierre Monmarché

In this article we consider Bayesian estimation of static parameters for a class of partially observed McKean-Vlasov diffusion processes with discrete-time observations over a fixed time interval. This problem features several obstacles to…

Computation · Statistics 2025-04-23 Ajay Jasra , Amin Wu

In this paper we present an extension of population-based Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) to the trans-dimensional case. One of the main challenges in MCMC-based inference is that of simulating from high and trans-dimensional target…

Computation · Statistics 2007-11-02 Ajay Jasra , David A. Stephens , Chris C. Holmes

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…

Computation · Statistics 2021-12-10 Guangyao Zhou

As sample sizes grow, scalability has become a central concern in the development of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. One general approach to this problem, exemplified by the popular stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD)…

Computation · Statistics 2024-12-04 Natesh S. Pillai , Aaron Smith , Azeem Zaman

Stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (SG-MCMC) has become increasingly popular for simulating posterior samples in large-scale Bayesian modeling. However, existing SG-MCMC schemes are not tailored to any specific probabilistic…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-06-13 Wenbo Gong , Yingzhen Li , José Miguel Hernández-Lobato

We study approximations of evolving probability measures by an interacting particle system. The particle system dynamics is a combination of independent Markov chain moves and importance sampling/resampling steps. Under global regularity…

Probability · Mathematics 2011-12-12 Andreas Eberle , Carlo Marinelli