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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…
The Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are popular when considering sampling from a high-dimensional random variable $\mathbf{x}$ with possibly unnormalised probability density $p$ and observed data $\mathbf{d}$. However, MCMC requires…
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…
We propose and demonstrate a novel, effective approach to slice sampling. Using the probability integral transform, we first generalize Neal's shrinkage algorithm, standardizing the procedure to an automatic and universal starting point:…
We propose a novel sampling framework for inference in probabilistic models: an active learning approach that converges more quickly (in wall-clock time) than Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) benchmarks. The central challenge in…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a well-established family of algorithms primarily used in Bayesian statistics to sample from a target distribution when direct sampling is challenging. Existing work on Bayesian decision trees uses MCMC.…
This paper presents a new Markov chain Monte Carlo method to sample from the posterior distribution of conjugate mixture models. This algorithm relies on a flexible split-merge procedure built using the particle Gibbs sampler. Contrary to…
We propose an exact slice sampler for Hierarchical Dirichlet process (HDP) and its associated mixture models (Teh et al., 2006). Although there are existing MCMC algorithms for sampling from the HDP, a slice sampler has been missing from…
Computing the volume of a polytope in high dimensions is computationally challenging but has wide applications. Current state-of-the-art algorithms to compute such volumes rely on efficient sampling of a Gaussian distribution restricted to…
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…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods sample from unnormalized probability distributions and offer guarantees of exact sampling. However, in the continuous case, unfavorable geometry of the target distribution can greatly limit the…
We consider the problem of sampling from a log-concave distribution $\pi(\theta) \propto e^{-f(\theta)}$ constrained to a polytope $K:=\{\theta \in \mathbb{R}^d: A\theta \leq b\}$, where $A\in \mathbb{R}^{m\times d}$ and $b \in…
Generating random variates from high-dimensional distributions is often done approximately using Markov chain Monte Carlo. In certain cases, perfect simulation algorithms exist that allow one to draw exactly from the stationary…
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…
In recent decades, a number of profound theorems concerning approximation of hard counting problems have appeared. These include estimation of the permanent, estimating the volume of a convex polyhedron, and counting (approximately) the…
Equality-constrained models naturally arise in problems in which measurements are taken at different levels of resolution. The challenge in this setting is that the models usually induce a joint distribution which is intractable. Resorting…
We develop a Multi-Scale Merge-Split Markov chain on redistricting plans. The chain is designed to be usable as the proposal in a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm. Sampling the space of plans amounts to dividing a graph into a…
In statistical analysis, Monte Carlo (MC) stands as a classical numerical integration method. When encountering challenging sample problem, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a commonly employed method. However, the MCMC estimator is biased…
We consider the problem of approximating an unknown function from point evaluations. This problem is a crucial subproblem in many modern (nonlinear) approximation schemes. When obtaining these point evaluations is costly, minimising the…
As it has become common to use many computer cores in routine applications, finding good ways to parallelize popular algorithms has become increasingly important. In this paper, we present a parallelization scheme for Markov chain Monte…