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Gibbs samplers are popular algorithms to approximate posterior distributions arising from Bayesian hierarchical models. Despite their popularity and good empirical performances, however, there are still relatively few quantitative results…
We develop a new framework to prove the mixing or relaxation time for the Glauber dynamics on spin systems with unbounded degree. It works for general spin systems including both $2$-spin and multi-spin systems. As applications for this…
We develop a computationally efficient and robust algorithm for generating pseudo-random samples from a broad class of smooth probability distributions in one and two dimensions. The algorithm is based on inverse transform sampling with a…
The problem of drawing samples from a discrete distribution can be converted into a discrete optimization problem. In this work, we show how sampling from a continuous distribution can be converted into an optimization problem over…
Gibbs sampling is a Markov chain Monte Carlo method that is often used for learning and inference on graphical models. Minibatching, in which a small random subset of the graph is used at each iteration, can help make Gibbs sampling scale…
Sampling from Gibbs distribution is a central problem in computer science as well as in statistical physics. In this work we focus on the k-colouring model} and the hard-core model with fugacity \lambda when the underlying graph is an…
We develop effective methods for constructing an ensemble of district plans via independent sampling from a reasonable probability distribution on the space of graph partitions. We compare the performance of our algorithms to that of…
Random-scan Gibbs samplers possess a natural hierarchical structure. The structure connects Gibbs samplers targeting higher dimensional distributions to those targeting lower dimensional ones. This leads to a quasi-telescoping property of…
The traditional maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) is often of limited use in complex high-dimensional data due to the intractability of the underlying likelihood function. Maximum composite likelihood estimation (McLE) avoids full…
The objective of this paper is to study the Gibbs sampling for computing the mean of observable in very high dimension - a powerful Markov chain Monte Carlo method. Under the Dobrushin's uniqueness condition, we establish some explicit and…
Geographical data are generally autocorrelated. In this case, it is preferable to select spread units. In this paper, we propose a new method for selecting well-spread samples from a finite spatial population with equal or unequal inclusion…
The exact solution of the Ising model on the complete graph (CG) provides an important, though mean-field, insight for the theory of continuous phase transitions. Besides the original spin, the Ising model can be formulated in the…
Motivated by a sampling problem basic to computational statistical inference, we develop a nearly optimal algorithm for a fundamental problem in spectral graph theory and numerical analysis. Given an $n\times n$ SDDM matrix ${\bf…
The well-known Gumbel-Max trick for sampling from a categorical distribution can be extended to sample $k$ elements without replacement. We show how to implicitly apply this 'Gumbel-Top-$k$' trick on a factorized distribution over…
We show that the two dimensional Ising model is complete, in the sense that the partition function of any lattice model on any graph is equal to the partition function of the 2D Ising model with complex coupling. The latter model has all…
Markov chain sampling methods that automatically adapt to characteristics of the distribution being sampled can be constructed by exploiting the principle that one can sample from a distribution by sampling uniformly from the region under…
The optimal instant of observation of astrophysical phenomena for objects that vary on human time-sales is an important problem, as it bears on the cost-effective use of usually scarce observational facilities. In this paper we address this…
We consider local Markov chain Monte-Carlo algorithms for sampling from the weighted distribution of independent sets with activity $\l$, where the weight of an independent set $I$ is $\l^{|I|}$. A recent result has established that Gibbs…
Optimized sensing is important for computational imaging in low-resource environments, when images must be recovered from severely limited measurements. In this paper, we propose a physics-constrained, fully differentiable, autoencoder that…
We study the mixing time of the symmetric beta-binomial splitting process on finite weighted connected graphs $G=(V,E,\{r_e\}_{e\in E})$ with vertex set $V$, edge set $E$ and positive edge-weights $r_e>0$ for $e\in E$. This is an…