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Related papers: Rapid Convergence of Informed Importance Tempering

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Bayesian analysis often concerns an evaluation of models with different dimensionality as is necessary in, for example, model selection or mixture models. To facilitate this evaluation, transdimensional Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-08-13 Daniel W. Heck , Antony M. Overstall , Quentin F. Gronau , Eric-Jan Wagenmakers

Improving efficiency of importance sampler is at the center of research in Monte Carlo methods. While adaptive approach is usually difficult within the Markov Chain Monte Carlo framework, the counterpart in importance sampling can be…

Methodology · Statistics 2007-12-11 Heng Lian

Markov chain Monte Carlo methods are a powerful and commonly used family of numerical methods for sampling from complex probability distributions. As applications of these methods increase in size and complexity, the need for efficient…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2019-01-31 Colin Cotter , Simon Cotter , Paul Russell

Importance sampling (IS) is commonly used for cross validation (CV) in Bayesian models, because it only involves reweighting existing posterior draws without needing to re-estimate the model by re-running Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC).…

Computation · Statistics 2025-08-12 Geonhee Han , Andrew Gelman

Multi-sample, importance-weighted variational autoencoders (IWAE) give tighter bounds and more accurate uncertainty estimates than variational autoencoders (VAE) trained with a standard single-sample objective. However, IWAEs scale poorly:…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-01-18 Laurence Aitchison

Importance sampling is a Monte Carlo technique for efficiently estimating the likelihood of rare events by biasing the sampling distribution towards the rare event of interest. By drawing weighted samples from a learned proposal…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-20 Liam A. Kruse , Marc R. Schlichting , Mykel J. Kochenderfer

We propose a novel sampling framework for inference in probabilistic models: an active learning approach that converges more quickly (in wall-clock time) than Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) benchmarks. The central challenge in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-11-04 Tom Gunter , Michael A. Osborne , Roman Garnett , Philipp Hennig , Stephen J. Roberts

We propose a new class of interacting Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms designed for increasing the efficiency of a modified multiple-try Metropolis (MTM) algorithm. The extension with respect to the existing MCMC literature is…

Computation · Statistics 2014-03-19 Roberto Casarin , Radu V. Craiu , Fabrizio Leisen

Bayesian inference for models that have an intractable partition function is known as a doubly intractable problem, where standard Monte Carlo methods are not applicable. The past decade has seen the development of auxiliary variable Monte…

Computation · Statistics 2017-10-13 Richard G. Everitt , Dennis Prangle , Philip Maybank , Mark Bell

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…

Computation · Statistics 2022-06-08 Víctor Elvira , Émilie Chouzenoux

This work describes methodologies to successfully implement the Implicit Monte Carlo (IMC) scheme for thermal radiative transfer in reduced-precision floating-point arithmetic. The methods used can be broadly categorized into scaling…

Computational Physics · Physics 2025-10-27 Simon Butson , Mathew Cleveland , Alex Long , Todd Palmer

There is a lack of simple and scalable algorithms for uncertainty quantification. Bayesian methods quantify uncertainty through posterior and predictive distributions, but it is difficult to rapidly estimate summaries of these…

Computation · Statistics 2016-12-28 Cheng Li , Sanvesh Srivastava , David B. Dunson

Accept-reject based Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are the workhorse algorithm for Bayesian inference. These algorithms, like Metropolis-Hastings, require choosing a proposal distribution which is typically informed by the desired…

Computation · Statistics 2026-04-21 Dwija Kakkad , Dootika Vats

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are commonly used for their versatility in sampling from complicated probability distributions. However, as the dimension of the distribution gets larger, the computational costs for a satisfactory…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2020-12-01 Hector J. Hortua , Riccardo Volpi , Dimitri Marinelli , Luigi Malago

An efficient simulation-based methodology is proposed for the rolling window estimation of state space models, called particle rolling Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) with double block sampling. In our method, which is based on Sequential…

Computation · Statistics 2021-09-17 Naoki Awaya , Yasuhiro Omori

Monte Carlo methods -- such as Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and piecewise deterministic Markov process (PDMP) samplers -- provide asymptotically exact estimators of expectations under a target distribution. There is growing interest in…

Computation · Statistics 2024-09-09 Adrien Corenflos , Matthew Sutton , Nicolas Chopin

Bayesian inference for factorial hidden Markov models is challenging due to the exponentially sized latent variable space. Standard Monte Carlo samplers can have difficulties effectively exploring the posterior landscape and are often…

Computation · Statistics 2019-02-28 Kaspar Märtens , Michalis K Titsias , Christopher Yau

The Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are popular when considering sampling from a high-dimensional random variable $\mathbf{x}$ with possibly unnormalised probability density $p$ and observed data $\mathbf{d}$. However, MCMC requires…

Computation · Statistics 2020-03-11 Haoyun Ying , Keheng Mao , Klaus Mosegaard

A fundamental challenge in Bayesian inference is efficient representation of a target distribution. Many non-parametric approaches do so by sampling a large number of points using variants of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). We propose an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-25 Cole Hawkins , Alec Koppel , Zheng Zhang

Importance sampling (IS) is a Monte Carlo technique for the approximation of intractable distributions and integrals with respect to them. The origin of IS dates from the early 1950s. In the last decades, the rise of the Bayesian paradigm…

Computation · Statistics 2024-06-21 Víctor Elvira , Luca Martino