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We consider versions of the Metropolis algorithm which avoid the inefficiency of rejections. We first illustrate that a natural Uniform Selection Algorithm might not converge to the correct distribution. We then analyse the use of Markov…
The multiple-try Metropolis (MTM) algorithm is a generalization of the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm in which the transition kernel uses a compound proposal consisting of multiple candidate draws. Since its seminal paper there have been…
Local optimization presents a promising approach to expensive, high-dimensional black-box optimization by sidestepping the need to globally explore the search space. For objective functions whose gradient cannot be evaluated directly,…
Memetic computation (MC) has emerged recently as a new paradigm of efficient algorithms for solving the hardest optimization problems. On the other hand, artificial bees colony (ABC) algorithms demonstrate good performances when solving…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a popular Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm that generates proposals for a Metropolis-Hastings algorithm by simulating the dynamics of a Hamiltonian system. However, HMC is sensitive to large time…
Black-box optimization is a very active area of research, with many new algorithms being developed every year. This variety is needed, on the one hand, since different algorithms are most suitable for different types of optimization…
Simulated Annealing using Metropolis steps at decreasing temperatures is widely used to solve complex combinatorial optimization problems. In order to improve its efficiency, we can use the Rejection-Free version of the Metropolis…
The one-fifth rule and its generalizations are a classical parameter control mechanism in discrete domains. They have also been transferred to control the offspring population size of the $(1, \lambda)$-EA. This has been shown to work very…
The Metropolis algorithm is one of the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods that realize sampling from the target probability distribution. In this paper, we are concerned with the sampling from the distribution in non-identifiable cases…
We propose an adaptive Metropolis-Hastings algorithm in which sampled data are used to update the proposal distribution. We use the samples found by the algorithm at a particular step to form the information-theoretically optimal mean-field…
We consider the problem of sampling from a strongly log-concave density in $\mathbb{R}^d$, and prove a non-asymptotic upper bound on the mixing time of the Metropolis-adjusted Langevin algorithm (MALA). The method draws samples by…
Due to the highly non-convex nature of large-scale robust parameter estimation, avoiding poor local minima is challenging in real-world applications where input data is contaminated by a large or unknown fraction of outliers. In this paper,…
When conducting Bayesian inference, delayed acceptance (DA) Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithms and DA pseudo-marginal MH algorithms can be applied when it is computationally expensive to calculate the true posterior or an unbiased estimate…
The Adaptive Metropolis (AM) algorithm is based on the symmetric random-walk Metropolis algorithm. The proposal distribution has the following time-dependent covariance matrix at step $n+1$ \[ S_n = Cov(X_1,...,X_n) + \epsilon I, \] that…
The problem of optimally scaling the proposal distribution in a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm is critical to the quality of the generated samples. Much work has gone into obtaining such results for various Metropolis-Hastings (MH)…
Using a simple, annealed model, some of the key features of the recently introduced extremal optimization heuristic are demonstrated. In particular, it is shown that the dynamics of local search possesses a generic critical point under the…
The Metropolis algorithm involves producing a Markov chain to converge to a specified target density $\pi$. In order to improve its efficiency, we can use the Rejection-Free version of the Metropolis algorithm, which avoids the inefficiency…
Over the last decades, various "non-linear" MCMC methods have arisen. While appealing for their convergence speed and efficiency, their practical implementation and theoretical study remain challenging. In this paper, we introduce a…
Non-convex optimization is ubiquitous in modern machine learning. Researchers devise non-convex objective functions and optimize them using off-the-shelf optimizers such as stochastic gradient descent and its variants, which leverage the…
MCMC algorithms such as Metropolis-Hastings algorithms are slowed down by the computation of complex target distributions as exemplified by huge datasets. We offer in this paper a useful generalisation of the Delayed Acceptance approach,…