Related papers: The Apogee to Apogee Path Sampler

Stochastic approximation Monte Carlo (SAMC) has recently been proposed by Liang, Liu and Carroll [J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 102 (2007) 305--320] as a general simulation and optimization algorithm. In this paper, we propose to improve its…

Global fits of physics models require efficient methods for exploring high-dimensional and/or multimodal posterior functions. We introduce a novel method for accelerating Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling by pairing a…

The answers to data assimilation questions can be expressed as path integrals over all possible state and parameter histories. We show how these path integrals can be evaluated numerically using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo method designed to…

We develop an Evolutionary Markov Chain Monte Carlo (EMCMC) algorithm for sampling spatial partitions that lie within a large and complex spatial state space. Our algorithm combines the advantages of evolutionary algorithms (EAs) as…

With its systematic exploration of probability distributions, Hamiltonian Monte Carlo is a potent Markov Chain Monte Carlo technique; it is an approach, however, ultimately contingent on the choice of a suitable Hamiltonian function. By…

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo can provide powerful inference in complex statistical problems, but ultimately its performance is sensitive to various tuning parameters. In this paper we use the underlying geometry of Hamiltonian Monte Carlo to…

Importance sampling is a Monte Carlo method that introduces a proposal distribution to sample the space according to the target distribution. Yet calibration of the proposal distribution is essential to achieving efficiency, thus the resort…

We present the preliminary tests on two modifications of the Hybrid Monte Carlo (HMC) algorithm. Both algorithms are designed to travel much farther in the Hamiltonian phase space for each trajectory and reduce the autocorrelations among…

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…

Traditionally, the field of computational Bayesian statistics has been divided into two main subfields: variational methods and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). In recent years, however, several methods have been proposed based on combining…

A Monte Carlo algorithm is said to be adaptive if it automatically calibrates its current proposal distribution using past simulations. The choice of the parametric family that defines the set of proposal distributions is critical for good…

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…

Assume interest is in sampling from a probability distribution $\mu$ defined on $(\mathsf{Z},\mathscr{Z})$. We develop a framework for sampling algorithms which takes full advantage of ODE numerical integrators, say…

Probabilistic models are conceptually powerful tools for finding structure in data, but their practical effectiveness is often limited by our ability to perform inference in them. Exact inference is frequently intractable, so approximate…

In Bayesian inference, Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a popular Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm known for its efficiency in sampling from complex probability distributions. However, its application to models with latent…

We propose a fast stochastic Hamilton Monte Carlo (HMC) method, for sampling from a smooth and strongly log-concave distribution. At the core of our proposed method is a variance reduction technique inspired by the recent advance in…

We discuss Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) and event-chain Monte Carlo (ECMC) for the one-dimensional chain of particles with harmonic interactions and benchmark them against local reversible Metropolis algorithms. While HMC achieves…

Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) is a class of Bayesian inference algorithms that targets for problems with intractable or {unavailable} likelihood function. It uses synthetic data drawn from the simulation model to approximate the…

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…

Zigzag and other piecewise deterministic Markov process samplers have attracted significant interest for their non-reversibility and other appealing properties for Bayesian posterior computation. Hamiltonian Monte Carlo is another…