Related papers: Optimal Scaling for the Proximal Langevin Algorith…
The adaptive Metropolis (AM) algorithm of Haario, Saksman and Tamminen [Bernoulli 7 (2001) 223-242] uses the estimated covariance of the target distribution in the proposal distribution. This paper introduces a new robust adaptive…
Gradient-based Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods have recently received much attention for sampling discrete distributions, with interesting connections to their continuous counterparts. For examples, there are two discrete analogues to the…
We develop a class of interacting particle systems for implementing a maximum marginal likelihood estimation (MMLE) procedure to estimate the parameters of a latent variable model. We achieve this by formulating a continuous-time…
We consider distributed estimation of the inverse covariance matrix, also called the concentration or precision matrix, in Gaussian graphical models. Traditional centralized estimation often requires global inference of the covariance…
We propose a new sampling algorithm combining two quite powerful ideas in the Markov chain Monte Carlo literature -- adaptive Metropolis sampler and two-stage Metropolis-Hastings sampler. The proposed sampling method will be particularly…
Sampling from constrained statistical distributions is a fundamental task in various fields including Bayesian statistics, computational chemistry, and statistical physics. This article considers the cases where the constrained distribution…
In this paper, we study the problem of sampling from a given probability density function that is known to be smooth and strongly log-concave. We analyze several methods of approximate sampling based on discretizations of the (highly…
We consider the problem of sampling from a distribution governed by a potential function. This work proposes an explicit score based MCMC method that is deterministic, resulting in a deterministic evolution for particles rather than a…
We study the problem of computing the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) of multivariate log-concave densities. Our main result is the first computationally efficient algorithm for this problem. In more detail, we give an algorithm that, on…
This paper presents a detailed theoretical analysis of the three stochastic approximation proximal gradient algorithms proposed in our companion paper [49] to set regularization parameters by marginal maximum likelihood estimation. We prove…
We study the class of first-order locally-balanced Metropolis--Hastings algorithms introduced in Livingstone & Zanella (2021). To choose a specific algorithm within the class the user must select a balancing function $g:\mathbb{R} \to…
Normalizing flows (NF) use a continuous generator to map a simple latent (e.g. Gaussian) distribution, towards an empirical target distribution associated with a training data set. Once trained by minimizing a variational objective, the…
We propose the particle dual averaging (PDA) method, which generalizes the dual averaging method in convex optimization to the optimization over probability distributions with quantitative runtime guarantee. The algorithm consists of an…
Latent variable models are widely used in social and behavioural sciences, including education, psychology, and political science. With the increasing availability of large and complex datasets, high-dimensional latent variable models have…
We propose the approximate Laplace approximation (ALA) to evaluate integrated likelihoods, a bottleneck in Bayesian model selection. The Laplace approximation (LA) is a popular tool that speeds up such computation and equips strong model…
We propose a sampling algorithm that achieves superior complexity bounds in all the classical settings (strongly log-concave, log-concave, Logarithmic-Sobolev inequality (LSI), Poincar\'e inequality) as well as more general settings with…
The expectation maximization (EM) algorithm is a widespread method for empirical Bayesian inference, but its expectation step (E-step) is often intractable. Employing a stochastic approximation scheme with Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)…
The Pseudo-Marginal (PM) algorithm is a popular Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method used to sample from a target distribution when its density is inaccessible, but can be estimated with a non-negative unbiased estimator. Its performance…
We study the Proximal Langevin Algorithm (PLA) for sampling from a probability distribution $\nu = e^{-f}$ on $\mathbb{R}^n$ under isoperimetry. We prove a convergence guarantee for PLA in Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence when $\nu$…
Stochastic gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms are popular samplers for approximate inference, but they are generally biased. We show that many recent versions of these methods (e.g. Chen et al. (2014)) cannot be corrected using…