Related papers: Sampling from high-dimensional, multimodal distrib…
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…
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…
Modified Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (MHMC) methods combine the ideas behind two popular sampling approaches: Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) and importance sampling. As in the HMC case, the bulk of the computational cost of MHMC algorithms lies…
In performing a Bayesian analysis, two difficult problems often emerge. First, in estimating the parameters of some model for the data, the resulting posterior distribution may be multi-modal or exhibit pronounced (curving) degeneracies.…
We unify slice sampling and Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) sampling, demonstrating their connection via the Hamiltonian-Jacobi equation from Hamiltonian mechanics. This insight enables extension of HMC and slice sampling to a broader family…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a premier Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm for continuous target distributions. Its full potential can only be unleashed when its problem-dependent hyperparameters are tuned well. The adaptation of…
Based on a new coupling approach, we prove that the transition step of the Hamiltonian Monte Carlo algorithm is contractive w.r.t. a carefully designed Kantorovich (L1 Wasserstein) distance. The lower bound for the contraction rate is…
Sampling from high-dimensional distributions has wide applications in data science and machine learning but poses significant computational challenges. We introduce Subspace Langevin Monte Carlo (SLMC), a novel and efficient sampling method…
Monte Carlo sampling for Bayesian posterior inference is a common approach used in machine learning. The Markov Chain Monte Carlo procedures that are used are often discrete-time analogues of associated stochastic differential equations…
Building upon Lagrangian mechanics on Wess's $q$-commutative spaces, we derive the $q$-deformed Hamiltonian dynamics as formulated by Lavagno et al. (2006). We then develop a computationally tractable scheme and propose a novel Hamiltonian…
Sampling from posterior distributions using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods can require an exhaustive number of iterations, particularly when the posterior is multi-modal as the MCMC sampler can become trapped in a local mode for a…
In Monte Carlo simulations, proposed configurations are accepted or rejected according to an acceptance ratio, which depends on an underlying probability distribution and an a priori sampling probability. By carefully selecting the…
A number of problems in a variety of fields are characterised by target distributions with a multimodal structure in which the presence of several isolated local maxima dramatically reduces the efficiency of Markov Chain Monte Carlo…
The Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) algorithm is often lauded for its ability to effectively sample from high-dimensional distributions. In this paper we challenge the presumed domination of HMC for the Bayesian analysis of GLMs. By utilizing…
Efficient sampling of many-dimensional and multimodal density functions is a task of great interest in many research fields. We describe an algorithm that allows parallelizing inherently serial Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling by…
In this paper we demonstrate that tempering Markov chain Monte Carlo samplers for Bayesian models by recursively subsampling observations without replacement can improve the performance of baseline samplers in terms of effective sample size…
A parallelized hybrid Monte Carlo (HMC) methodology is devised to quantify the microstructural evolution of polycrystalline material under elastic loading. The approach combines a time explicit material point method (MPM) for the mechanical…
Pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) detect low-frequency gravitational waves (GWs) by looking for correlated deviations in pulse arrival times. Current Bayesian searches use Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, which struggle to sample the…
The tempered Lefschetz thimble method (TLTM) is a parallel-tempering algorithm towards solving the numerical sign problem, where the system is tempered by the antiholomorphic gradient flow to tame both the sign and ergodicity problems…
One of the open challenges in quantum computing is to find meaningful and practical methods to leverage quantum computation to accelerate classical machine learning workflows. A ubiquitous problem in machine learning workflows is sampling…