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The performance of sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) samplers heavily depends on the tuning of the Markov kernels used in the path proposal. For SMC samplers with unadjusted Markov kernels, standard tuning objectives, such as the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-11 Kyurae Kim , Zuheng Xu , Jacob R. Gardner , Trevor Campbell

By facilitating the generation of samples from arbitrary probability distributions, Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is, arguably, \emph{the} tool for the evaluation of Bayesian inference problems that yield non-standard posterior…

Computation · Statistics 2021-05-27 Peter L Green , Robert E Moore , Ryan J Jackson , Jinglai Li , Simon Maskell

A core problem in statistics and probabilistic machine learning is to compute probability distributions and expectations. This is the fundamental problem of Bayesian statistics and machine learning, which frames all inference as…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-12-06 Christian A. Naesseth , Fredrik Lindsten , Thomas B. Schön

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are used to estimate features of interest of a distribution. The Monte Carlo error in estimation has an asymptotic normal distribution whose multivariate nature has so far been ignored in the MCMC…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2016-07-05 Dootika Vats , James M. Flegal , Galin L. Jones

Adaptive Markov chains are an important class of Monte Carlo methods for sampling from probability distributions. The time evolution of adaptive algorithms depends on past samples, and thus these algorithms are non-Markovian. Although there…

Probability · Mathematics 2014-10-02 Natesh S. Pillai , Aaron Smith

Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods, also known as particle filters, constitute a class of algorithms used to approximate expectations with respect to a sequence of probability distributions as well as the normalising constants of those…

Computation · Statistics 2026-01-14 Axel Finke , Arnaud Doucet , Adam M. Johansen

Recent advances in stochastic gradient techniques have made it possible to estimate posterior distributions from large datasets via Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). However, when the target posterior is multimodal, mixing performance is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-01-12 Yizhe Zhang , Changyou Chen , Zhe Gan , Ricardo Henao , Lawrence Carin

Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms are used to simulate from complex statistical distributions by way of a local exploration of these distributions. This local feature avoids heavy requests on understanding the nature of the target, but it…

Computation · Statistics 2018-04-12 Christian P. Robert , Victor Elvira , Nick Tawn , Changye Wu

Cyclical MCMC is a novel MCMC framework recently proposed by Zhang et al. (2019) to address the challenge posed by high-dimensional multimodal posterior distributions like those arising in deep learning. The algorithm works by generating a…

Computation · Statistics 2024-03-04 Liwei Wang , Xinru Liu , Aaron Smith , Yves Atchade

The problem of optimising functions with intractable gradients frequently arise in machine learning and statistics, ranging from maximum marginal likelihood estimation procedures to fine-tuning of generative models. Stochastic approximation…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-30 James Cuin , Davide Carbone , Yanbo Tang , O. Deniz Akyildiz

We propose a novel sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) method for sampling from unnormalized target distributions based on a reverse denoising diffusion process. While recent diffusion-based samplers simulate the reverse diffusion using…

Computation · Statistics 2025-11-06 Luhuan Wu , Yi Han , Christian A. Naesseth , John P. Cunningham

We propose kernel sequential Monte Carlo (KSMC), a framework for sampling from static target densities. KSMC is a family of sequential Monte Carlo algorithms that are based on building emulator models of the current particle system in a…

Computation · Statistics 2017-07-26 Ingmar Schuster , Heiko Strathmann , Brooks Paige , Dino Sejdinovic

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods asymptotically sample from complex probability distributions. The pseudo-marginal MCMC framework only requires an unbiased estimator of the unnormalized probability distribution function to construct…

Computation · Statistics 2016-05-25 Iain Murray , Matthew M. Graham

Random sampling of graph partitions under constraints has become a popular tool for evaluating legislative redistricting plans. Analysts detect partisan gerrymandering by comparing a proposed redistricting plan with an ensemble of sampled…

Applications · Statistics 2023-11-09 Cory McCartan , Kosuke Imai

We propose a new framework for how to use sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithms for inference in probabilistic graphical models (PGM). Via a sequential decomposition of the PGM we find a sequence of auxiliary distributions defined on a…

Methodology · Statistics 2014-10-07 Christian A. Naesseth , Fredrik Lindsten , Thomas B. Schön

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a powerful methodology for the approximation of posterior distributions. However, the iterative nature of MCMC does not naturally facilitate its use with modern highly parallel computation on HPC and cloud…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a well-established family of algorithms which are primarily used in Bayesian statistics to sample from a target distribution when direct sampling is challenging. Single instances of MCMC methods are widely…

Computation · Statistics 2019-05-27 Alessandro Varsi , Lykourgos Kekempanos , Jeyarajan Thiyagalingam , Simon Maskell

In online clustering problems, there is often a large amount of uncertainty over possible cluster assignments that cannot be resolved until more data are observed. This difficulty is compounded when clusters follow complex distributions, as…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-17 Connie Trojan , Pavel Myshkov , Paul Fearnhead , James Hensman , Tom Minka , Christopher Nemeth

Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) is a class of algorithms that approximate high-dimensional expectations of a Markov chain. SMC algorithms typically include a resampling step. There are many possible ways to resample, but the relative…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2019-04-01 Robert J. Webber

This paper addresses finite sample stability properties of sequential Monte Carlo methods for approximating sequences of probability distributions. The results presented herein are applicable in the scenario where the start and end…

Computation · Statistics 2015-03-19 Nick Whiteley