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Practitioners of Bayesian statistics have long depended on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) to obtain samples from intractable posterior distributions. Unfortunately, MCMC algorithms are typically serial, and do not scale to the large…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-06-11 Maxim Rabinovich , Elaine Angelino , Michael I. Jordan

We propose Adaptive Incremental Mixture Markov chain Monte Carlo (AIMM), a novel approach to sample from challenging probability distributions defined on a general state-space. While adaptive MCMC methods usually update a parametric…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-06-01 Florian Maire , Nial Friel , Antonietta Mira , Adrian Raftery

This paper proposes a new importance sampling (IS) that is tailored to quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) integration over $\mathbb{R}^s$. IS introduces a multiplicative adjustment to the integrand by compensating the sampling from the proposal…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-09-19 Zexin Pan , Du Ouyang , Zhijian He

We investigate lower bounds on the subgeometric convergence of adaptive Markov chain Monte Carlo under any adaptation strategy. In particular, we prove general lower bounds in total variation and on the weak convergence rate under general…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-06-17 Austin Brown , Jeffrey S. Rosenthal

Gibbs sampling is one of the most commonly used Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms due to its simplicity and efficiency. It cycles through the latent variables, sampling each one from its distribution conditional on the current…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-26 Yanbo Wang , Wenyu Chen , Shimin Shan

In the presence of confounders, the ordinary least squares (OLS) estimator is known to be biased. This problem can be remedied by using the two-stage least squares (TSLS) estimator, based on the availability of valid instrumental variables…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-04-15 Cedric E. Ginestet , Richard Emsley , Sabine Landau

Cr\'epey, Frikha, and Louzi (2025) introduced a multilevel stochastic approximation scheme to compute the value-at-risk of a financial loss that is only simulatable by Monte Carlo. The best complexity of the scheme is in…

Risk Management · Quantitative Finance 2026-04-14 Stéphane Crépey , Noufel Frikha , Azar Louzi , Jonathan Spence

We consider the problem of optimising the expected value of a loss functional over a nonlinear model class of functions, assuming that we have only access to realisations of the gradient of the loss. This is a classical task in statistics,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-02 Robert Gruhlke , Anthony Nouy , Philipp Trunschke

We consider the problem of learning high-dimensional Gaussian graphical models. The graphical lasso is one of the most popular methods for estimating Gaussian graphical models. However, it does not achieve the oracle rate of convergence. In…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-06-06 Qiang Sun , Kean Ming Tan , Han Liu , Tong Zhang

Most current sampling algorithms for high-dimensional distributions are based on MCMC techniques and are approximate in the sense that they are valid only asymptotically. Rejection sampling, on the other hand, produces valid samples, but is…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-07-04 Marc Dymetman , Guillaume Bouchard , Simon Carter

Mean-field, ensemble-chain, and adaptive samplers have historically been viewed as distinct approaches to Monte Carlo sampling. In this paper, we present a unifying {two-system} framework that brings all three under one roof. In our…

Computation · Statistics 2026-05-13 James Chok , Myung Won Lee , Daniel Paulin , Geoffrey M. Vasil

In the field of global optimization, many existing algorithms face challenges posed by non-convex target functions and high computational complexity or unavailability of gradient information. These limitations, exacerbated by sensitivity to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-10-16 Xinyu Zhang , Sujit Ghosh

Applying standard Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms to large data sets is computationally expensive. Both the calculation of the acceptance probability and the creation of informed proposals usually require an iteration through the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-06-15 Yee Whye Teh , Alexandre Thiéry , Sebastian Vollmer

We present Bayesian techniques for solving inverse problems which involve mean-square convergent random approximations of the forward map. Noisy approximations of the forward map arise in several fields, such as multiscale problems and…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2021-11-08 Giacomo Garegnani

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

Modern approaches to perform Bayesian variable selection rely mostly on the use of shrinkage priors. That said, an ideal shrinkage prior should be adaptive to different signal levels, ensuring that small effects are ruled out, while keeping…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-11-14 Santiago Marin , Bronwyn Loong , Anton H. Westveld

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, such as the Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithm, are widely used for Bayesian inference. One of the most important issues for any MCMC method is the convergence of the Markov chain, which depends…

Computation · Statistics 2015-11-20 Luca Martino , Jesse Read , David Luengo

Langevin algorithms are gradient descent methods augmented with additive noise, and are widely used in Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling, optimization, and machine learning. In recent years, the non-asymptotic analysis of Langevin…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-10 Yuping Zheng , Andrew Lamperski

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods sample from unnormalized probability distributions and offer guarantees of exact sampling. However, in the continuous case, unfavorable geometry of the target distribution can greatly limit the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-09 Zengyi Li , Yubei Chen , Friedrich T. Sommer

Kernel matrices (e.g. Gram or similarity matrices) are essential for many state-of-the-art approaches to classification, clustering, and dimensionality reduction. For large datasets, the cost of forming and factoring such kernel matrices…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-05-21 Raajen Patel , Thomas A. Goldstein , Eva L. Dyer , Azalia Mirhoseini , Richard G. Baraniuk