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Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms offer various strategies for sampling; the Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) family of samplers are MCMC algorithms which often exhibit improved mixing properties. The recently introduced magnetic HMC,…
Traditional gradient-based sampling methods, like standard Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, require that the desired target distribution is continuous and differentiable. This limits the types of models one can define, although the presented models…
We propose a hybrid Monte Carlo (HMC) technique applicable to high-dimensional multivariate normal distributions that effectively samples along chaotic trajectories. The method is predicated on the freedom of choice of the HMC momentum…
Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods are a class of techniques to sample approximately from any sequence of probability distributions using a combination of importance sampling and resampling steps. This paper is concerned with the…
We develop a modular approach to Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling for unnormalized target densities. In this approach, Markov chains are constructed in parallel, each constrained to a subset of the target space. The Monte Carlo…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) sampling methods provide a mechanism for defining distant proposals with high acceptance probabilities in a Metropolis-Hastings framework, enabling more efficient exploration of the state space than standard…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms provide a very general recipe for estimating properties of complicated distributions. While their use has become commonplace and there is a large literature on MCMC theory and practice, MCMC users…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are a powerful tool for computation with complex probability distributions. However the performance of such methods is critically dependant on properly tuned parameters, most of which are difficult if…
Accurate and efficient estimation of rare events probabilities is of significant importance, since often the occurrences of such events have widespread impacts. The focus in this work is on precisely quantifying these probabilities, often…
For big data analysis, high computational cost for Bayesian methods often limits their applications in practice. In recent years, there have been many attempts to improve computational efficiency of Bayesian inference. Here we propose an…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is widely used for sampling from high dimensional target distributions with densities known up to proportionality. While HMC exhibits favorable scaling properties in high dimensions, it struggles with strongly…
Nested sampling is a powerful approach to Bayesian inference ultimately limited by the computationally demanding task of sampling from a heavily constrained probability distribution. An effective algorithm in its own right, Hamiltonian…
Standard Markov chain Monte Carlo methods struggle to explore distributions that are concentrated in the neighbourhood of low-dimensional structures. These pathologies naturally occur in a number of situations. For example, they are common…
Various Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are studied to improve upon random walk Metropolis sampling, for simulation from complex distributions. Examples include Metropolis-adjusted Langevin algorithms, Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, and…
Bayesian reasoning in linear mixed-effects models (LMMs) is challenging and often requires advanced sampling techniques like Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). A common approach is to write the model in a probabilistic programming language…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a powerful algorithm to sample latent variables from Bayesian models. The advent of probabilistic programming languages (PPLs) frees users from writing inference algorithms and lets users focus on modeling.…
The goal of this article is to introduce the Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) method -- a Hamiltonian dynamics-inspired algorithm for sampling from a Gibbs density $\pi(x) \propto e^{-f(x)}$. We focus on the "idealized" case, where one can…
Constraints can be interpreted in a broad sense as any kind of explicit restriction over the parameters. While some constraints are defined directly on the parameter space, when they are instead defined by known behaviour on the model,…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a sampling-based method for estimating features of probability distributions. MCMC methods produce a serially correlated, yet representative, sample from the desired distribution. As such it can be…
Bayesian models have become very popular over the last years in several fields such as signal processing, statistics, and machine learning. Bayesian inference requires the approximation of complicated integrals involving posterior…