Related papers: Perfecting MCMC Sampling: Recipes and Reservations
The use of heuristics to assess the convergence and compress the output of Markov chain Monte Carlo can be sub-optimal in terms of the empirical approximations that are produced. Typically a number of the initial states are attributed to…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods asymptotically sample from complex probability distributions. The pseudo-marginal MCMC framework only requires an unbiased estimator of the unnormalized probability distribution function to construct…
Performing reliable Bayesian inference on a big data scale is becoming a keystone in the modern era of machine learning. A workhorse class of methods to achieve this task are Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms and their design to…
We introduce a new class of sequential Monte Carlo methods which reformulates the essence of the nested sampling method of Skilling (2006) in terms of sequential Monte Carlo techniques. Two new algorithms are proposed, nested sampling via…
This paper concerns the introduction of a new Markov Chain Monte Carlo scheme for posterior sampling in Bayesian nonparametric mixture models with priors that belong to the general Poisson-Kingman class. We present a novel compact way of…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are based on the construction of a Markov chain with transition probabilities leaving invariant a probability distribution of interest. In this work, we look at these transition probabilities as…
Statisticians often use Monte Carlo methods to approximate probability distributions, primarily with Markov chain Monte Carlo and importance sampling. Sequential Monte Carlo samplers are a class of algorithms that combine both techniques to…
Markov-chain Monte Carlo sampling has become a standard technique for exploring the posterior distribution of cosmological parameters constrained by observations of CMB anisotropies. Given an infinite amount of time, any MCMC sampler will…
Multimodal structures in the sampling density (e.g. two competing phases) can be a serious problem for traditional Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), because correct sampling of the different structures can only be guaranteed for infinite…
This paper is a tutorial and literature review on sampling algorithms. We have two main types of sampling in statistics. The first type is survey sampling which draws samples from a set or population. The second type is sampling from…
We develop exact Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for discretely-sampled, directly and indirectly observed diffusions. The qualification "exact" refers to the fact that the invariant and limiting distribution of the Markov chains is the…
Constrained decoding enables Language Models (LMs) to produce samples that provably satisfy hard constraints. However, existing constrained-decoding approaches often distort the underlying model distribution, a limitation that is especially…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) produces a correlated sample for estimating expectations with respect to a target distribution. A fundamental question is when should sampling stop so that we have good estimates of the desired quantities?…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are a powerful tool for computation with complex probability distributions. However the performance of such methods is critically dependant on properly tuned parameters, most of which are difficult if…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a powerful methodology for the approximation of posterior distributions. However, the iterative nature of MCMC does not naturally facilitate its use with modern highly parallel computation on HPC and cloud…
Performing numerical integration when the integrand itself cannot be evaluated point-wise is a challenging task that arises in statistical analysis, notably in Bayesian inference for models with intractable likelihood functions. Markov…
Standard Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) admits three fundamental control parameters: the number of chains, the length of the warmup phase, and the length of the sampling phase. These control parameters play a large role in determining the…
The literature in social network analysis has largely focused on methods and models which require complete network data; however there exist many networks which can only be studied via sampling methods due to the scale or complexity of the…
We propose a new class of interacting Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms designed for increasing the efficiency of a modified multiple-try Metropolis (MTM) algorithm. The extension with respect to the existing MCMC literature is…
This review treats the mathematical and algorithmic foundations of non-reversible Markov chains in the context of event-chain Monte Carlo (ECMC), a continuous-time lifted Markov chain that employs the factorized Metropolis algorithm. It…