Related papers: Importance is Important: Generalized Markov Chain …

Markov jump processes (MJPs) are continuous-time stochastic processes widely used in a variety of applied disciplines. Inference for MJPs typically proceeds via Markov chain Monte Carlo, the state-of-the-art being a uniformization-based…

We introduce a Monte Carlo algorithm to efficiently compute transport properties of chaotic dynamical systems. Our method exploits the importance sampling technique that favors trajectories in the tail of the distribution of displacements,…

Exact approximations of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are a general emerging class of sampling algorithms. One of the main ideas behind exact approximations consists of replacing intractable quantities required to run standard…

Sequential optimization methods are often confronted with the curse of dimensionality in high-dimensional spaces. Current approaches under the Gaussian process framework are still burdened by the computational complexity of tracking…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are employed to sample from a given distribution of interest, whenever either the distribution does not exist in closed form, or, if it does, no efficient method to simulate an independent sample from…

The ability to generate samples of the random effects from their conditional distributions is fundamental for inference in mixed effects models. Random walk Metropolis is widely used to conduct such sampling, but such a method can converge…

The multiple-try Metropolis (MTM) algorithm is an extension of the Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithm by selecting the proposed state among multiple trials according to some weight function. Although MTM has gained great popularity owing to…

Bayesian hierarchical modeling is a popular approach to capturing unobserved heterogeneity across individual units. However, standard estimation methods such as Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) can be impracticable for modeling outcomes from…

The marginal likelihood is a central tool for drawing Bayesian inference about the number of components in mixture models. It is often approximated since the exact form is unavailable. A bias in the approximation may be due to an incomplete…

It has become increasingly easy nowadays to collect approximate posterior samples via fast algorithms such as variational Bayes, but concerns exist about the estimation accuracy. It is tempting to build solutions that exploit approximate…

Non-differentiable priors are standard in modern parsimonious Bayesian models. Lack of differentiability, however, precludes gradient-based Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) for posterior sampling. Recently proposed proximal MCMC approaches…

We present a two-stage Metropolis-Hastings algorithm for sampling probabilistic models, whose log-likelihood is computationally expensive to evaluate, by using a surrogate Gaussian Process (GP) model. The key feature of the approach, and…

The Multiple Try Metropolis (MTM) method is a generalization of the classical Metropolis-Hastings algorithm in which the next state of the chain is chosen among a set of samples, according to normalized weights. In the literature, several…

We propose a method to construct a proposal density for the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm in Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulations of the GARCH model. The proposal density is constructed adaptively by using the data sampled by the…

Importance sampling (IS) is commonly used for cross validation (CV) in Bayesian models, because it only involves reweighting existing posterior draws without needing to re-estimate the model by re-running Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC).…

Many random processes can be simulated as the output of a deterministic model accepting random inputs. Such a model usually describes a complex mathematical or physical stochastic system and the randomness is introduced in the input…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are widely used in machine learning. One of the major problems with MCMC is the question of how to design chains that mix fast over the whole state space; in particular, how to select the parameters…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling of densities restricted to linearly constrained domains is an important task arising in Bayesian treatment of inverse problems in the natural sciences. While efficient algorithms for uniform polytope…

Despite the enormous success of Hamiltonian Monte Carlo and related Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, sampling often still represents the computational bottleneck in scientific applications. Availability of parallel resources can…

We introduce new Gaussian proposals to improve the efficiency of the standard Hastings-Metropolis algorithm in Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, used for the sampling from a target distribution in large dimension $d$. The improved…