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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…
This paper investigates methods for estimating the optimal stochastic control policy for a Markov Decision Process with unknown transition dynamics and an unknown reward function. This form of model-free reinforcement learning comprises…
The correspondence between the cross-entropy method and the zero-variance approximation to simulate a rare event problem in Markov chains is shown. This leads to a sufficient condition that the cross-entropy estimator is asymptotically…
Results obtained with stochastic methods have an inherent uncertainty due to the finite number of samples that can be achieved in practice. In lattice QCD this problem is particularly salient in some observables like, for instance,…
Motivated by robotic surveillance applications, this paper studies the novel problem of maximizing the return time entropy of a Markov chain, subject to a graph topology with travel times and stationary distribution. The return time entropy…
We study a variance reduction strategy based on control variables for simulating the averaged macroscopic behavior of a stochastic slow-fast system. We assume that this averaged behavior can be written in terms of a few slow degrees of…
A general methodology is presented for the construction and effective use of control variates for reversible MCMC samplers. The values of the coefficients of the optimal linear combination of the control variates are computed, and adaptive,…
In this paper, we study a mean-variance optimization problem in an infinite horizon discrete time discounted Markov decision process (MDP). The objective is to minimize the variance of system rewards with the constraint of mean performance.…
The Markov Chain Monte Carlo method is the dominant paradigm for posterior computation in Bayesian analysis. It is common to control computation time by making approximations to the Markov transition kernel. Comparatively little attention…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods sample from unnormalized probability distributions and offer guarantees of exact sampling. However, in the continuous case, unfavorable geometry of the target distribution can greatly limit the…
Identifying important features linked to a response variable is a fundamental task in various scientific domains. This article explores statistical inference for simulated Markov random fields in high-dimensional settings. We introduce a…
We study the asymptotic behavior of kernel estimators of asymptotic variances (or long-run variances) for a class of adaptive Markov chains. The convergence is studied both in $L^p$ and almost surely. The results also apply to Markov chains…
In this paper, we study the problem of estimating the autocovariance sequence resulting from a reversible Markov chain. A motivating application for studying this problem is the estimation of the asymptotic variance in central limit…
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…
In this paper we build on previous work which uses inferences techniques, in particular Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, to solve parameterized control problems. We propose a number of modifications in order to make this approach…
We show that Markov couplings can be used to improve the accuracy of Markov chain Monte Carlo calculations in some situations where the steady-state probability distribution is not explicitly known. The technique generalizes the notion of…
This paper studies the use of a machine learning-based estimator as a control variate for mitigating the variance of Monte Carlo sampling. Specifically, we seek to uncover the key factors that influence the efficiency of control variates in…
The asymptotic variance is an important criterion to evaluate the performance of Markov chains, especially for the central limit theorems. We give the variational formulas for the asymptotic variance of discrete-time (non-reversible) Markov…
There are two ways of speeding up MCMC algorithms: (1) construct more complex samplers that use gradient and higher order information about the target and (2) design a control variate to reduce the asymptotic variance. While the efficiency…
We develop a martingale approximation approach to studying the limiting behavior of quadratic forms of Markov chains. We use the technique to examine the asymptotic behavior of lag-window estimators in time series and we apply the results…