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Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are widely used to sample from complicated distributions, especially to sample from the posterior distribution in Bayesian inference. However, MCMC is not directly applicable when facing the doubly…

Computation · Statistics 2019-03-29 Guanyang Wang

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are algorithms for sampling probability distributions, commonly applied to the Boltzmann distribution in physical and chemical models such as protein folding and the Ising model. These methods enable…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-12-04 Aingeru Ramos , Jose A. Pascual , Javier Navaridas , Ivan Coluzza

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are a workhorse of probabilistic modeling and inference, but are difficult to debug, and are prone to silent failure if implemented naively. We outline several strategies for testing the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2014-12-18 Roger B. Grosse , David K. Duvenaud

In statistical analysis, Monte Carlo (MC) stands as a classical numerical integration method. When encountering challenging sample problem, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a commonly employed method. However, the MCMC estimator is biased…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2024-11-05 Jiarui Du , Zhijian He

Sampling from complicated probability distributions is a hard computational problem arising in many fields, including statistical physics, optimization, and machine learning. Quantum computers have recently been used to sample from…

Bayesian inference for Markov processes has become increasingly relevant in recent years. Problems of this type often have intractable likelihoods and prior knowledge about model rate parameters is often poor. Markov Chain Monte Carlo…

Computation · Statistics 2014-10-23 Jamie Owen , Darren J. Wilkinson , Colin S. Gillespie

In this article we consider Bayesian estimation of static parameters for a class of partially observed McKean-Vlasov diffusion processes with discrete-time observations over a fixed time interval. This problem features several obstacles to…

Computation · Statistics 2025-04-23 Ajay Jasra , Amin Wu

Many problems of practical interest rely on Continuous-time Markov chains~(CTMCs) defined over combinatorial state spaces, rendering the computation of transition probabilities, and hence probabilistic inference, difficult or impossible…

We propose approaches for testing implementations of Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods as well as of general Monte Carlo methods. Based on statistical hypothesis tests, these approaches can be used in a unit testing framework to, for…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-09-21 Axel Gandy , James Scott

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are indispensable when sampling from a complex, high-dimensional distribution by a conventional method is intractable. Even though MCMC is a powerful tool, it is also hard to control and tune in…

Graphics · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Sascha Holl , Gurprit Singh , Hans-Peter Seidel

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) requires to evaluate the full data likelihood at different parameter values iteratively and is often computationally infeasible for large data sets. In this paper, we propose to approximate the log-likelihood…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-05-26 Guanyu Hu , HaiYing Wang

In this paper a method based on a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm is proposed to compute the probability of a rare event. The conditional distribution of the underlying process given that the rare event occurs has the probability…

Probability · Mathematics 2012-11-12 Thorbjörn Gudmundsson , Henrik Hult

The Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method is used to evaluate the imaginary-time path integral of a quantum oscillator with a potential that includes both a quadratic term and a quartic term whose coupling is varied by several orders of…

Computational Physics · Physics 2020-08-27 Shikhar Mittal , Marise J. E. Westbroek , Peter R. King , Dimitri D. Vvedensky

Generalized linear mixed models (GLMMs) are often used for analyzing correlated non-Gaussian data. The likelihood function in a GLMM is available only as a high dimensional integral, and thus closed-form inference and prediction are not…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-06-27 Vivekananda Roy

We investigate the complexity of covariance matrix estimation for Gibbs distributions based on dependent samples from a Markov chain. We show that when $\pi$ satisfies a Poincar\'e inequality and the chain possesses a spectral gap, we can…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-10-23 Yunbum Kook , Matthew S. Zhang

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods generate samples that are asymptotically distributed from a target distribution of interest as the number of iterations goes to infinity. Various theoretical results provide upper bounds on the…

Computation · Statistics 2019-10-30 Niloy Biswas , Pierre E. Jacob , Paul Vanetti

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…

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

We propose new Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms to sample probability distributions on submanifolds, which generalize previous methods by allowing the use of set-valued maps in the proposal step of the MCMC algorithms. The motivation for…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2021-10-07 Tony Lelièvre , Gabriel Stoltz , Wei Zhang

We propose a new Markov chain Monte Carlo method in which trial configurations are generated by evolving a state, sampled from a prior distribution, using a Markov transition matrix. We present two prototypical algorithms and derive their…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2023-01-09 Joel Mabillard , Isha Malhotra , Bortolo Matteo Mognetti