Related papers: Markov Chain Concentration with an Application in …
An introduction to the use of linchpin variables in Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is provided. Before the widespread adoption of MCMC methods, conditional sampling using linchpin variables was essentially the only practical approach for…
Let $X,X_1,...,X_n$ be independent identically distributed random variables. In this paper we study the behavior of the concentration functions of the weighted sums $\sum\limits_{k=1}^{n}a_k X_k$ with respect to the arithmetic structure of…
We propose a novel approach to concentration for non-independent random variables. The main idea is to ``pretend'' that the random variables are independent and pay a multiplicative price measuring how far they are from actually being…
Following the concentration of the measure theory formalism, we consider the transformation $\Phi(Z)$ of a random variable $Z$ having a general concentration function $\alpha$. If the transformation $\Phi$ is $\lambda$-Lipschitz with…
Let $\alpha$ be a Steinhaus or a Rademacher random multiplicative function. For a wide class of multiplicative functions $f$ we show that the sum $\sum_{n \le x}\alpha(n) f(n)$, normalised to have mean square $1$, has a non-Gaussian…
This paper develops a general concentration inequality for the suprema of empirical processes with dependent data. The concentration inequality is obtained by combining generic chaining with a coupling-based strategy. Our framework…
Structured distributions, i.e. distributions over combinatorial spaces, are commonly used to learn latent probabilistic representations from observed data. However, scaling these models is bottlenecked by the high computational and memory…
The paper deals with the asymptotic laws of functional of standard random variables. These classes of statistics are closely related to estimators of the extreme value index when the underlying distribution function is in the Weibull domain…
We prove concentration inequalities for $f\left( X\right) $ about its median, where $X$ is a random vector in $\mathbb{R}^n$ with independent heavy tailed coordinates of Weibull or power type, and $f:\mathbb{R}^n\rightarrow\mathbb{R}$ is a…
We give Hoeffding and Bernstein-type concentration inequalities for the largest eigenvalue of sums of random matrices arising from a Markov chain. We consider time-dependent matrix-valued functions on a general state space, generalizing…
We introduce a novel framework to account for sensitivity to rewards uncertainty in sequential decision-making problems. While risk-sensitive formulations for Markov decision processes studied so far focus on the distribution of the…
A rescaled Markov chain converges uniformly in probability to the solution of an ordinary differential equation, under carefully specified assumptions. The presentation is much simpler than those in the outside literature. The result may be…
In this paper, we present a brief survey of Reinforcement Learning (RL), with particular emphasis on Stochastic Approximation (SA) as a unifying theme. The scope of the paper includes Markov Reward Processes, Markov Decision Processes,…
This note provides a basic description of subgaussianity, by defining $(\sigma, \rho)$-subgaussian random variables $X$ ($\sigma>0, \rho>0$) as those satisfying $\mathbb{E}(\exp(\lambda X))\leq \rho\exp(\frac{1}{2}\sigma^2\lambda^2)$ for…
Penalized and robust regression, especially when approached from a Bayesian perspective, can involve the problem of simulating a random variable $\boldsymbol z$ from a posterior distribution that includes a term proportional to a sum of…
We consider a Markov chain X_1, X_2, ..., X_n belonging to a class of iterated random functions, which is "one-step contracting" with respect to some distance d. If f is any separately Lipschitz function with respect to d, we use a well…
We demonstrate the use of a variational method to determine a quantitative lower bound on the rate of convergence of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms as a function of the target density and proposal density. The bound relies on…
We consider the problem of inferring a latent function in a probabilistic model of data. When dependencies of the latent function are specified by a Gaussian process and the data likelihood is complex, efficient computation often involve…
We consider two examples for a well-known method for obtaining concentration of measure (COM) bounds for a given observable in a given measure. The method is to consider an auxiliary Markov chain for which the invariant distribution is the…
We introduce a class of Markov chains, that contains the model of stochastic approximation by averaging and non-averaging. Using martingale approximation method, we establish various deviation inequalities for separately Lipschitz functions…