Related papers: Global convergence of optimized adaptive importanc…
Although evaluation of the expectations on the Ising model is essential in various applications, it is mostly infeasible because of intractable multiple summations. Spatial Monte Carlo integration (SMCI) is a sampling-based approximation.…
Optimal experimental design (OED) seeks experiments expected to yield the most useful data for some purpose. In practical circumstances where experiments are time-consuming or resource-intensive, OED can yield enormous savings. We pursue…
The popularity of Adaptive MCMC has been fueled on the one hand by its success in applications, and on the other hand, by mathematically appealing and computationally straightforward optimisation criteria for the Metropolis algorithm…
We present an unbiased method for Bayesian posterior means based on kinetic Langevin dynamics that combines advanced splitting methods with enhanced gradient approximations. Our approach avoids Metropolis correction by coupling Markov…
Driven by several successful applications such as in stochastic gradient descent or in Bayesian computation, control variates have become a major tool for Monte Carlo integration. However, standard methods do not allow the distribution of…
In this article we develop a new sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) method for multilevel (ML) Monte Carlo estimation. In particular, the method can be used to estimate expectations with respect to a target probability distribution over an…
The naive importance sampling estimator, based on samples from a single importance density, can be numerically unstable. Instead, we consider generalized importance sampling estimators where samples from more than one probability…
Optimal experimental design (OED) provides a systematic approach to quantify and maximize the value of experimental data. Under a Bayesian approach, conventional OED maximizes the expected information gain (EIG) on model parameters.…
Frequentist and likelihood methods of inference based on the multivariate skew-normal model encounter several technical difficulties with this model. In spite of the popularity of this class of densities, there are no broadly satisfactory…
Explicit, momentum-based dynamics for optimizing functions defined on Lie groups was recently constructed, based on techniques such as variational optimization and left trivialization. We appropriately add tractable noise to the…
Adaptive importance sampling (AIS) uses past samples to update the \textit{sampling policy} $q_t$ at each stage $t$. Each stage $t$ is formed with two steps : (i) to explore the space with $n_t$ points according to $q_t$ and (ii) to exploit…
We consider the outstanding problem of sampling from an unnormalized density that may be non-log-concave and multimodal. To enhance the performance of simple Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, techniques of annealing type have been…
We establish an ordering criterion for the asymptotic variances of two consistent Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) estimators: an importance sampling (IS) estimator, based on an approximate reversible chain and subsequent IS weighting, and a…
In this paper we address the convergence of stochastic approximation when the functions to be minimized are not convex and nonsmooth. We show that the "mean-limit" approach to the convergence which leads, for smooth problems, to the ODE…
We propose an unconstrained stochastic approximation method of finding the optimal measure change (in an a priori parametric family) for Monte Carlo simulations. We consider different parametric families based on the Girsanov theorem and…
Increased access to computing resources has led to the development of algorithms that can run efficiently on multi-core processing units or in distributed computing environments. In the context of Bayesian inference, many parallel computing…
Large scale optimization problems are ubiquitous in machine learning and data analysis and there is a plethora of algorithms for solving such problems. Many of these algorithms employ sub-sampling, as a way to either speed up the…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo and underdamped Langevin Monte Carlo are state-of-the-art methods for taking samples from high-dimensional distributions with a differentiable density function. To generate samples, they numerically integrate…
In this paper, we propose a stochastic optimization method that adaptively controls the sample size used in the computation of gradient approximations. Unlike other variance reduction techniques that either require additional storage or the…
It is of significant interest in many applications to sample from a high-dimensional target distribution $\pi$ with the density $\pi(\text{d} x) \propto e^{-U(x)} (\text{d} x) $, based on the temporal discretization of the Langevin…