Related papers: Stein $\Pi$-Importance Sampling
Stein thinning is a promising algorithm proposed by (Riabiz et al., 2022) for post-processing outputs of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). The main principle is to greedily minimize the kernelized Stein discrepancy (KSD), which only requires…
In parameter estimation problems one computes a posterior distribution over uncertain parameters defined jointly by a prior distribution, a model, and noisy data. Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is often used for the numerical solution of…
Message-Passing Monte Carlo (MPMC) was recently introduced as a novel low-discrepancy sampling approach leveraging tools from geometric deep learning. While originally designed for generating uniform point sets, we extend this framework to…
The availability of data sets with large numbers of variables is rapidly increasing. The effective application of Bayesian variable selection methods for regression with these data sets has proved difficult since available Markov chain…
Approximating the stationary probability of a state in a Markov chain through Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques is, in general, inefficient. Standard random walk approaches require $\tilde{O}(\tau/\pi(v))$ operations to approximate the…
Adaptive importance sampling is a powerful tool to sample from complicated target densities, but its success depends sensitively on the initial proposal density. An algorithm is presented to automatically perform the initialization using…
Monte Carlo algorithms often aim to draw from a distribution $\pi$ by simulating a Markov chain with transition kernel $P$ such that $\pi$ is invariant under $P$. However, there are many situations for which it is impractical or impossible…
We consider the efficient use of an approximation within Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), with subsequent importance sampling (IS) correction of the Markov chain inexact output, leading to asymptotically exact inference. We detail…
State estimation in robotic systems presents significant challenges, particularly due to the prevalence of multimodal posterior distributions in real-world scenarios. One effective strategy for handling such complexity is to compute maximum…
This article describes a method for using optimization to derive efficient independent transition functions for Markov chain Monte Carlo simulations. Our interest is in sampling from a posterior density $\pi(x)$ for problems in which the…
Variational inference approximates the posterior distribution of a probabilistic model with a parameterized density by maximizing a lower bound for the model evidence. Modern solutions fit a flexible approximation with stochastic gradient…
We develop a new bidirectional algorithm for estimating Markov chain multi-step transition probabilities: given a Markov chain, we want to estimate the probability of hitting a given target state in $\ell$ steps after starting from a given…
We propose a Monte Carlo algorithm to sample from high dimensional probability distributions that combines Markov chain Monte Carlo and importance sampling. We provide a careful theoretical analysis, including guarantees on robustness to…
This paper considers importance sampling for estimation of rare-event probabilities in a specific collection of Markovian jump processes used for e.g. modelling of credit risk. Previous attempts at designing importance sampling algorithms…
Stochastic gradient methods are the workhorse (algorithms) of large-scale optimization problems in machine learning, signal processing, and other computational sciences and engineering. This paper studies Markov chain gradient descent, a…
There is a growing interest in the literature for adaptive Markov chain Monte Carlo methods based on sequences of random transition kernels $\{P_n\}$ where the kernel $P_n$ is allowed to have an invariant distribution $\pi_n$ not…
Using Markov chain Monte Carlo to sample from posterior distributions was the key innovation which made Bayesian data analysis practical. Notoriously, however, MCMC is hard to tune, hard to diagnose, and hard to parallelize. This…
We introduce Path-ZVA: an efficient simulation technique for estimating the probability of reaching a rare goal state before a regeneration state in a (discrete-time) Markov chain. Standard Monte Carlo simulation techniques do not work well…
Most Markov chain Monte Carlo methods operate in discrete time and are reversible with respect to the target probability. Nevertheless, it is now understood that the use of non-reversible Markov chains can be beneficial in many contexts. In…
Most successful applications of deep learning involve similar training and test conditions. However, tasks such as biological sequence design involve searching for sequences that improve desirable properties beyond previously known values,…