Related papers: The Importance Markov Chain
Traditional methods for unsupervised learning of finite mixture models require to evaluate the likelihood of all components of the mixture. This becomes computationally prohibitive when the number of components is large, as it is, for…
Adaptive Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms, which automatically tune their parameters based on past samples, have proved extremely useful in practice. The self-tuning mechanism makes them `non-Markovian', which means that their…
Importance sampling is often used in machine learning when training and testing data come from different distributions. In this paper we propose a new variant of importance sampling that can reduce the variance of importance sampling-based…
Markov chain Monte Carlo methods are a powerful and commonly used family of numerical methods for sampling from complex probability distributions. As applications of these methods increase in size and complexity, the need for efficient…
In networking applications, one often wishes to obtain estimates about the number of objects at different parts of the network (e.g., the number of cars at an intersection of a road network or the number of packets expected to reach a node…
The Markov chain Monte Carlo method is a versatile tool in statistical physics to evaluate multi-dimensional integrals numerically. For the method to work effectively, we must consider the following key issues: the choice of ensemble, the…
One of the major problems in adaptive filtering is the problem of system identification. It has been studied extensively due to its immense practical importance in a variety of fields. The underlying goal is to identify the impulse response…
In the context of Markov decision processes running in continuous time, one of the most intriguing challenges is the efficient approximation of finite horizon reachability objectives. A multitude of sophisticated model checking algorithms…
We develop a novel Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method that exploits a hierarchy of models of increasing complexity to efficiently generate samples from an unnormalized target distribution. Broadly, the method rewrites the Multilevel…
The Metropolis algorithm is a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm used to simulate from parameter distributions of interest, such as generalized linear model parameters. The "Metropolis step" is a keystone concept that underlies…
Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms are invaluable tools for exploring stationary properties of physical systems, especially in situations where direct sampling is unfeasible. Common implementations of Monte Carlo algorithms employ…
Parametric Markov chains occur quite naturally in various applications: they can be used for a conservative analysis of probabilistic systems (no matter how the parameter is chosen, the system works to specification); they can be used to…
A common tool in the practice of Markov Chain Monte Carlo is to use approximating transition kernels to speed up computation when the desired kernel is slow to evaluate or intractable. A limited set of quantitative tools exist to assess the…
The problem of sampling from the stationary distribution of a Markov chain finds widespread applications in a variety of fields. The time required for a Markov chain to converge to its stationary distribution is known as the classical…
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…
The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new Markov chain Monte Carlo method and exhibit its efficiency by simulation and high-dimensional asymptotic theory. Key fact is that our algorithm has a reversible proposal transition kernel,…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques are now widely used for cosmological parameter estimation. Chains are generated to sample the posterior probability distribution obtained following the Bayesian approach. An important issue is how…
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…
Markov chains are a class of probabilistic models that have achieved widespread application in the quantitative sciences. This is in part due to their versatility, but is compounded by the ease with which they can be probed analytically.…
Posterior sampling is a task of central importance in Bayesian inference. For many applications in Bayesian meta-analysis and Bayesian transfer learning, the prior distribution is unknown and needs to be estimated from samples. In practice,…