Related papers: NEO: Non Equilibrium Sampling on the Orbit of a De…
Many inference problems involve inferring the number $N$ of components in some region, along with their properties $\{\mathbf{x}_i\}_{i=1}^N$, from a dataset $\mathcal{D}$. A common statistical example is finite mixture modelling. In the…
We present a form of stratified MCMC algorithm built with non-reversible stochastic dynamics in mind. It can also be viewed as a generalization of the exact milestoning method, or form of NEUS. We prove convergence of the method under…
Monte Carlo sampling methods are the standard procedure for approximating complicated integrals of multidimensional posterior distributions in Bayesian inference. In this work, we focus on the class of Layered Adaptive Importance Sampling…
We propose a new Monte Carlo method for sampling from multimodal distributions. The idea of this technique is based on splitting the task into two: finding the modes of a target distribution $\pi$ and sampling, given the knowledge of the…
We study the approach to equilibrium of the event-chain Monte Carlo (ECMC) algorithm for the one-dimensional hard-sphere model. Using the connection to the coupon-collector problem, we prove that a specific version of this local…
We introduce shielded Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC), a constrained sampler inspired by navigation functions, capable of sampling from unnormalized target distributions defined over punctured supports. In other words, this approach samples from…
Importance sampling and independent Metropolis-Hastings (IMH) are among the fundamental building blocks of Monte Carlo methods. Both require a proposal distribution that globally approximates the target distribution. The Radon-Nikodym…
In this article we propose a novel MCMC method based on deterministic transformations T: X x D --> X where X is the state-space and D is some set which may or may not be a subset of X. We refer to our new methodology as Transformation-based…
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…
Annealed Sequential Monte Carlo (ASMC) samplers are special cases of SMC samplers where the sequence of distributions can be embedded in a smooth path of distributions. Using this underlying path and a performance model based on the…
Adaptive importance sampling (AIS) methods are increasingly used for the approximation of distributions and related intractable integrals in the context of Bayesian inference. Population Monte Carlo (PMC) algorithms are a subclass of AIS…
There has been considerable interest in designing Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms by exploiting numerical methods for Langevin dynamics, which includes Hamiltonian dynamics as a deterministic case. A prominent approach is Hamiltonian…
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,…
This work explores a novel perspective on solving nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization problems by leveraging sampling based methods. Instead of treating the objective function purely through traditional (often deterministic) optimization…
The data torrent unleashed by current and upcoming astronomical surveys demands scalable analysis methods. Many machine learning approaches scale well, but separating the instrument measurement from the physical effects of interest, dealing…
Evaluating the degree of partisan districting (Gerrymandering) in a statistical framework typically requires an ensemble of districting plans which are drawn from a prescribed probability distribution that adheres to a realistic and…
This paper studies the mixing time of certain adaptive Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms. Under some regularity conditions, we show that the convergence rate of Importance Resampling MCMC (IRMCMC) algorithm, measured in terms of the total…
Metropolis Hastings nested sampling evolves a Markov chain, accepting new points along the chain according to a version of the Metropolis Hastings acceptance ratio, which has been modified to satisfy the nested sampling likelihood…
Standard Markov chain Monte Carlo methods struggle to explore distributions that are concentrated in the neighbourhood of low-dimensional structures. These pathologies naturally occur in a number of situations. For example, they are common…
Non-differentiable priors are standard in modern parsimonious Bayesian models. Lack of differentiability, however, precludes gradient-based Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) for posterior sampling. Recently proposed proximal MCMC approaches…