Related papers: Perfecting MCMC Sampling: Recipes and Reservations

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is the engine of modern Bayesian statistics, being used to approximate the posterior and derived quantities of interest. Despite this, the issue of how the output from a Markov chain is post-processed and…

Strongly Rayleigh distributions are natural generalizations of product and determinantal probability distributions and satisfy strongest form of negative dependence properties. We show that the "natural" Monte Carlo Markov Chain (MCMC) is…

We elaborate the idea behind Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods in a mathematically coherent, yet simple and understandable way. To this end, we proof a pivotal convergence theorem for finite Markov chains and a minimal version of the…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have become a cornerstone of many modern scientific analyses by providing a straightforward approach to numerically estimate uncertainties in the parameters of a model using a sequence of random…

In this article we consider computing expectations w.r.t.~probability laws associated to a certain class of stochastic systems. In order to achieve such a task, one must not only resort to numerical approximation of the expectation, but…

This paper concerns the use of Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for posterior sampling in Bayesian nonparametric mixture models with normalized random measure priors. Making use of some recent posterior characterizations for the class of…

We show that for any multiple-try Metropolis algorithm, one can always accept the proposal and evaluate the importance weight that is needed to correct for the bias without extra computational cost. This results in a general, convenient,…

A system to update estimates from a sequence of probability distributions is presented. The aim of the system is to quickly produce estimates with a user-specified bound on the Monte Carlo error. The estimates are based upon weighted…

Sampling from posterior distributions using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods can require an exhaustive number of iterations, particularly when the posterior is multi-modal as the MCMC sampler can become trapped in a local mode for a…

It is widely known that the performance of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) can degrade quickly when targeting computationally expensive posterior distributions, such as when the sample size is large. This has motivated the search for MCMC…

We consider quantile estimation using Markov chain Monte Carlo and establish conditions under which the sampling distribution of the Monte Carlo error is approximately Normal. Further, we investigate techniques to estimate the associated…

Use each of n exact samples as the initial state for a MCMC sampler run for m steps. We give confidence intervals for accuracy of estimators which are always valid and which, in certain settings, are almost as good as the intervals one…

Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) samplers form an attractive alternative to MCMC for Bayesian computation. However, their performance depends strongly on the Markov kernels used to rejuvenate particles. We discuss how to calibrate automatically…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are sampling methods that have become a commonly used tool in statistics, for example to perform Monte Carlo integration. As a consequence of the increase in computational power, many variations of…

We merge in this note our two discussions about the Read Paper "Particle Markov chain Monte Carlo" (Andrieu, Doucet, and Holenstein, 2010) presented on October 16th 2009 at the Royal Statistical Society, appearing in the Journal of the…

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…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods provide consistent of integrals as the number of iterations goes to infinity. MCMC estimators are generally biased after any fixed number of iterations. We propose to remove this bias by using…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are indispensable when sampling from a complex, high-dimensional distribution by a conventional method is intractable. Even though MCMC is a powerful tool, it is also hard to control and tune in…

This Chapter, "ABC Samplers", is to appear in the forthcoming Handbook of Approximate Bayesian Computation (2018). It details the main ideas and algorithms used to sample from the ABC approximation to the posterior distribution, including…

This article reviews the application of advanced Monte Carlo techniques in the context of Multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC). MLMC is a strategy employed to compute expectations which can be biased in some sense, for instance, by using the…