Related papers: Sampling with Barriers: Faster Mixing via Lewis We…
The connections between (convex) optimization and (logconcave) sampling have been considerably enriched in the past decade with many conceptual and mathematical analogies. For instance, the Langevin algorithm can be viewed as a sampling…
Sampling from an unnormalized probability distribution is a fundamental problem in machine learning with applications including Bayesian modeling, latent factor inference, and energy-based model training. After decades of research,…
Random walks on expanders play a crucial role in Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms, derandomization, graph theory, and distributed computing. A desirable property is that they are rapidly mixing, which is equivalent to having a spectral…
We study the rate of convergence to equilibrium of the self-repellent random walk and its local time process on the discrete circle $\mathbb{Z}_n$. While the self-repellent random walk alone is non-Markovian since the jump rates depend on…
This paper addresses optimization problems constrained by partial differential equations with uncertain coefficients. In particular, the robust control problem and the average control problem are considered for a tracking type cost…
Random measures provide flexible parameters for Bayesian nonparametric models. Given two different priors for a random measure, we develop a natural framework to investigate the rate at which the corresponding posteriors merge, as the…
Generating samples from a continuous probability density is a central algorithmic problem across statistics, engineering, and the sciences. For high-dimensional settings, Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is the default algorithm across…
The weighted-Hamming metric generalizes the Hamming metric by assigning different weights to blocks of coordinates. It is well-suited for applications such as coding over independent parallel channels, each of which has a different level of…
We present an algorithm that, with high probability, generates a random spanning tree from an edge-weighted undirected graph in $\tilde{O}(n^{4/3}m^{1/2}+n^{2})$ time (The $\tilde{O}(\cdot)$ notation hides $\operatorname{polylog}(n)$…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a widely used sampler for continuous probability distributions. In many cases, the underlying Hamiltonian dynamics exhibit a phenomenon of resonance which decreases the efficiency of the algorithm and makes…
Based on a new coupling approach, we prove that the transition step of the Hamiltonian Monte Carlo algorithm is contractive w.r.t. a carefully designed Kantorovich (L1 Wasserstein) distance. The lower bound for the contraction rate is…
Random geometric graphs are random graph models defined on metric measure spaces. A random geometric graph is generated by first sampling points from a metric space and then connecting each pair of sampled points independently with a…
We construct integrators to be used in Hamiltonian (or Hybrid) Monte Carlo sampling. The new integrators are easily implementable and, for a given computational budget, may deliver five times as many accepted proposals as standard…
The Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) method allows sampling from continuous densities. Favorable scaling with dimension has led to wide adoption of HMC by the statistics community. Modern auto-differentiating software should allow more…
In this paper, we provide non-asymptotic upper bounds on the error of sampling from a target density using three schemes of discretized Langevin diffusions. The first scheme is the Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC) algorithm, the Euler…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) and related algorithms have become routinely used in Bayesian computation. In this article, we present a simple and provably accurate method to improve the efficiency of HMC and related algorithms with…
In this paper, we propose an interior-point method for linearly constrained optimization problems (possibly nonconvex). The method - which we call the Hessian barrier algorithm (HBA) - combines a forward Euler discretization of Hessian…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms play an important role in statistical inference problems dealing with intractable probability distributions. Recently, many MCMC algorithms such as Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) and Riemannian…
In this article, we analyze Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) by placing it in the setting of Riemannian geometry using the Jacobi metric, so that each step corresponds to a geodesic on a suitable Riemannian manifold. We then combine the notion…
Given a probability measure $\mu$ supported on a convex subset $\Omega$ of Euclidean space $(\mathbb{R}^d,g_0)$, we are interested in obtaining Poincar\'e and log-Sobolev type inequalities on $(\Omega,g_0,\mu)$. To this end, we change the…