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Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a powerful method for drawing samples from non-standard probability distributions and is utilized across many fields and disciplines. Methods such as Metropolis-Adjusted Langevin (MALA) and Hamiltonian…

Computation · Statistics 2024-10-28 Lee Devlin , Paul Horridge , Peter L. Green , Simon Maskell

The problem of estimating an unknown discrete distribution from its samples is a fundamental tenet of statistical learning. Over the past decade, it attracted significant research effort and has been solved for a variety of divergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-30 Yi Hao , Alon Orlitsky , Venkatadheeraj Pichapati

Bayesian inference allows us to define a posterior distribution over the weights of a generic neural network (NN). Exact posteriors are usually intractable, in which case approximations can be employed. One such approximation - variational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Andrew Millard , Joshua Murphy , Peter Green , Simon Maskell

Reflected diffusions in polyhedral domains are commonly used as approximate models for stochastic processing networks in heavy traffic. Stationary distributions of such models give useful information on the steady state performance of the…

Probability · Mathematics 2012-05-24 Amarjit Budhiraja , Jiang Chen , Sylvain Rubenthaler

We present a sequential Monte Carlo sampler algorithm for the Bayesian analysis of generalised linear mixed models (GLMMs). These models support a variety of interesting regression-type analyses, but performing inference is often extremely…

Computation · Statistics 2008-10-08 Y. Fan , D. S. Leslie , M. P. Wand

Bayesian neural learning feature a rigorous approach to estimation and uncertainty quantification via the posterior distribution of weights that represent knowledge of the neural network. This not only provides point estimates of optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-13 Rohitash Chandra , Konark Jain , Ratneel V. Deo , Sally Cripps

This paper addresses optimization problems constrained by partial differential equations with uncertain coefficients. In particular, the robust control problem and the average control problem are considered for a tracking type cost…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-11-08 Andreas Van Barel , Stefan Vandewalle

A procedure for unfolding the true distribution from experimental data is presented. Machine learning methods are applied for simultaneous identification of an apparatus function and solving of an inverse problem. A priori information about…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2011-05-26 Nikolai Gagunashvili

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…

Computation · Statistics 2022-03-18 Cosma Rohilla Shalizi

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-30 Tim Tsz-Kit Lau , Han Liu , Thomas Pock

Employing Bayesian inference to calibrate constitutive model parameters has grown substantially in recent years. Among the available techniques, Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling remains one of the most widely used approaches for…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Aricia Rinkens , Rodrigo L. S. Silva , Erik Quaeghebeur , Nick Jaensson , Clemens Verhoosel

We propose a novel deterministic sampling method to approximate a target distribution $\rho^*$ by minimizing the kernel discrepancy, also known as the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD). By employing the general \emph{energetic variational…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-12 Yindong Chen , Yiwei Wang , Lulu Kang , Chun Liu

Sampling from complicated probability distributions is a hard computational problem arising in many fields, including statistical physics, optimization, and machine learning. Quantum computers have recently been used to sample from…

Many machine learning problems involve Monte Carlo gradient estimators. As a prominent example, we focus on Monte Carlo variational inference (MCVI) in this paper. The performance of MCVI crucially depends on the variance of its stochastic…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-07-05 Alexander Buchholz , Florian Wenzel , Stephan Mandt

It was recently shown that path integral Monte Carlo can be used to directly compute partition functions of Hamiltonians with vibronic coupling [J. Chem. Phys. 148, 194110 (2018)]. While the importance sampling Monte Carlo integration…

Chemical Physics · Physics 2019-12-30 Dmitri Iouchtchenko , Neil Raymond , Pierre-Nicholas Roy , Marcel Nooijen

Recently, Stochastic Gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (SG-MCMC) methods have been proposed for scaling up Monte Carlo computations to large data problems. Whilst these approaches have proven useful in many applications, vanilla SG-MCMC…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-12-13 Umut Şimşekli , Roland Badeau , A. Taylan Cemgil , Gaël Richard

We propose a novel class of Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithms, appropriate for inference in probabilistic graphical models. This class of algorithms adopts a divide-and-conquer approach based upon an auxiliary tree-structured…

In many problems, complex non-Gaussian and/or nonlinear models are required to accurately describe a physical system of interest. In such cases, Monte Carlo algorithms are remarkably flexible and extremely powerful approaches to solve such…

Computation · Statistics 2015-04-23 Thi Le Thu Nguyen , Francois Septier , Gareth W. Peters , Yves Delignon

This paper focuses on variational inference with intractable likelihood functions that can be unbiasedly estimated. A flexible variational approximation based on Gaussian mixtures is developed, by adopting the mixture population Monte Carlo…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2021-12-02 Zhijian He , Shifeng Huo , Tianhui Yang

The efficiency of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) depends on how the underlying geometry of the problem is taken into account. For distributions with strongly varying curvature, Riemannian metrics help in efficient exploration of the target…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-02-03 Marcelo Hartmann , Mark Girolami , Arto Klami