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Stratified sampling is a fast and simple method to generate point sets with uniform distribution in hypercubes. However, for the most common paraxial stratfication it has the prominent drawback that the number of sampled points in n…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are widely used in machine learning. One of the major problems with MCMC is the question of how to design chains that mix fast over the whole state space; in particular, how to select the parameters…
We propose a method to sample stationary properties of solutions of stochastic differential equations, which is accurate and efficient if there are rarely visited regions or rare transitions between distinct regions of the state space. The…
Computational efficient evaluation of penalized estimators of multivariate exponential family distributions is sought. These distributions encompass among others Markov random fields with variates of mixed type (e.g. binary and continuous)…
Accelerated coordinate descent is widely used in optimization due to its cheap per-iteration cost and scalability to large-scale problems. Up to a primal-dual transformation, it is also the same as accelerated stochastic gradient descent…
In this paper we study the adaptivity of submodular maximization. Adaptivity quantifies the number of sequential rounds that an algorithm makes when function evaluations can be executed in parallel. Adaptivity is a fundamental concept that…
Computation of a signal's estimated covariance matrix is an important building block in signal processing, e.g., for spectral estimation. Each matrix element is a sum of products of elements in the input matrix taken over a sliding window.…
We consider Markov decision processes (MDP) as generators of sequences of probability distributions over states. A probability distribution is p-synchronizing if the probability mass is at least p in a single state, or in a given set of…
Over the last two decades, frameworks for distributed-memory parallel computation, such as MapReduce, Hadoop, Spark and Dryad, have gained significant popularity with the growing prevalence of large network datasets. The Massively Parallel…
The growing interest for high dimensional and functional data analysis led in the last decade to an important research developing a consequent amount of techniques. Parallelized algorithms, which consist in distributing and treat the data…
Gradient descent, and coordinate descent in particular, are core tools in machine learning and elsewhere. Large problem instances are common. To help solve them, two orthogonal approaches are known: acceleration and parallelism. In this…
We describe a new sampling-based method to determine cuts in an undirected graph. For a graph (V, E), its cycle space is the family of all subsets of E that have even degree at each vertex. We prove that with high probability, sampling the…
\emph{Sampling} constitutes an important tool in a variety of areas: from machine learning and combinatorial optimization to computational physics and biology. A central class of sampling algorithms is the \emph{Markov Chain Monte Carlo}…
The PC algorithm is the state-of-the-art algorithm for causal structure discovery on observational data. It can be computationally expensive in the worst case due to the conditional independence tests are performed in an…
Slice Sampling has emerged as a powerful Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm that adapts to the characteristics of the target distribution with minimal hand-tuning. However, Slice Sampling's performance is highly sensitive to the…
We present a systematic study of the nested sampling algorithm based on the example of the Potts model. This model, which exhibits a first order phase transition for $q>4$, exemplifies a generic numerical challenge in statistical physics:…
This paper studies the problem of finding an $(1+\epsilon)$-approximate solution to positive semidefinite programs. These are semidefinite programs in which all matrices in the constraints and objective are positive semidefinite and all…
We study the problem of scheduling $n$ independent moldable tasks on $m$ processors that arises in large-scale parallel computations. When tasks are monotonic, the best known result is a $(\frac{3}{2}+\epsilon)$-approximation algorithm for…
We present an efficient parallel derandomization method for randomized algorithms that rely on concentrations such as the Chernoff bound. This settles a classic problem in parallel derandomization, which dates back to the 1980s. Consider…
In this paper, we propose a parallel shooting algorithm for solving nonlinear model predictive control problems using sequential quadratic programming. This algorithm is built on a two-phase approach where we first test and assess…