Related papers: Fast Conditional Mixing of MCMC Algorithms for Non…
We obtain several quantitative bounds on the mixing properties of the Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) algorithm for a strongly log-concave target distribution $\pi$ on $\mathbb{R}^{d}$, showing that HMC mixes quickly in this setting. One of…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are simple and extremely powerful techniques to sample from almost arbitrary distributions. The flaw in practice is that it can take a large and/or unknown amount of time to converge to the…
We study the problem of approximate sampling from non-log-concave distributions, e.g., Gaussian mixtures, which is often challenging even in low dimensions due to their multimodality. We focus on performing this task via Markov chain Monte…
Classically, the continuous-time Langevin diffusion converges exponentially fast to its stationary distribution $\pi$ under the sole assumption that $\pi$ satisfies a Poincar\'e inequality. Using this fact to provide guarantees for the…
Gaussian Process (GP) models are a powerful and flexible tool for non-parametric regression and classification. Computation for GP models is intensive, since computing the posterior density, $\pi$, for covariance function parameters…
We compare convergence rates of Metropolis--Hastings chains to multi-modal target distributions when the proposal distributions can be of ``local'' and ``small world'' type. In particular, we show that by adding occasional long-range jumps…
Cyclical MCMC is a novel MCMC framework recently proposed by Zhang et al. (2019) to address the challenge posed by high-dimensional multimodal posterior distributions like those arising in deep learning. The algorithm works by generating a…
We propose a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm based on third-order Langevin dynamics for sampling from distributions with log-concave and smooth densities. The higher-order dynamics allow for more flexible discretization schemes,…
Sampling from Gibbs distributions and computing their log-partition function are fundamental tasks in statistics, machine learning, and statistical physics. While efficient algorithms are known for log-concave densities, the worst-case…
Sampling from distributions play a crucial role in aiding practitioners with statistical inference. However, in numerous situations, obtaining exact samples from complex distributions is infeasible. Consequently, researchers often turn to…
We study Bayesian estimation of mixture models and argue in favor of fitting the marginal posterior distribution over component assignments directly, rather than Gibbs sampling from the joint posterior on components and parameters as is…
Many problems arising in applications result in the need to probe a probability distribution for functions. Examples include Bayesian nonparametric statistics and conditioned diffusion processes. Standard MCMC algorithms typically become…
A key task in Bayesian statistics is sampling from distributions that are only specified up to a partition function (i.e., constant of proportionality). However, without any assumptions, sampling (even approximately) can be #P-hard, and few…
Component-wise MCMC algorithms, including Gibbs and conditional Metropolis-Hastings samplers, are commonly used for sampling from multivariate probability distributions. A long-standing question regarding Gibbs algorithms is whether a…
The Metropolis-within-Gibbs (MwG) algorithm is a widely used Markov Chain Monte Carlo method for sampling from high-dimensional distributions when exact conditional sampling is intractable. We study MwG with Random Walk Metropolis (RWM)…
Probabilistic models are conceptually powerful tools for finding structure in data, but their practical effectiveness is often limited by our ability to perform inference in them. Exact inference is frequently intractable, so approximate…
We propose quantum algorithms that provide provable speedups for Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods commonly used for sampling from probability distributions of the form $\pi \propto e^{-f}$, where $f$ is a potential function. Our…
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…
While on the one hand, chaotic dynamical systems can be predicted for all time given exact knowledge of an initial state, they are also in many cases rapidly mixing, meaning that smooth probabilistic information (quantified by measures) on…
I introduce a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) scheme in which sampling from a distribution with density pi(x) is done using updates operating on an "ensemble" of states. The current state x is first stochastically mapped to an ensemble,…