Related papers: Randomized quasi-Monte Carlo methods for risk-aver…
We demonstrate the use of a variational method to determine a quantitative lower bound on the rate of convergence of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms as a function of the target density and proposal density. The bound relies on…
The problem of optimising functions with intractable gradients frequently arise in machine learning and statistics, ranging from maximum marginal likelihood estimation procedures to fine-tuning of generative models. Stochastic approximation…
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…
Importance Sampling (IS), an effective variance reduction strategy in Monte Carlo (MC) simulation, is frequently utilized for Bayesian inference and other statistical challenges. Quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) replaces the random samples in MC…
Practitioners of Bayesian statistics have long depended on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) to obtain samples from intractable posterior distributions. Unfortunately, MCMC algorithms are typically serial, and do not scale to the large…
The stochastic simulation algorithm (SSA) and the corresponding Monte Carlo (MC) method are among the most common approaches for studying stochastic processes. They rely on knowledge of interevent probability density functions (PDFs) and on…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) requires to evaluate the full data likelihood at different parameter values iteratively and is often computationally infeasible for large data sets. In this paper, we propose to approximate the log-likelihood…
We propose a sequential Markov chain Monte Carlo (SMCMC) algorithm to sample from a sequence of probability distributions, corresponding to posterior distributions at different times in on-line applications. SMCMC proceeds as in usual MCMC…
We present an original simulation-based method to estimate likelihood ratios efficiently for general state-space models. Our method relies on a novel use of the conditional Sequential Monte Carlo (cSMC) algorithm introduced in…
Reverse Monte Carlo (RMC) is an algorithm that incorporates stochastic modification of the action as part of the process that updates the fields in a Monte Carlo simulation. Such update moves have the potential of lowering or eliminating…
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…
We consider the computational efficiency of Monte Carlo (MC) and Multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) methods applied to partial differential equations with random coefficients. These arise, for example, in groundwater flow modelling, where a…
Random field Monte Carlo (MC) reliability analysis is a robust stochastic method to determine the probability of failure. This method, however, requires a large number of numerical simulations demanding high computational costs. This paper…
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…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) algorithms which combine numerical approximation of Hamiltonian dynamics on finite intervals with stochastic refreshment and Metropolis correction are popular sampling schemes, but it is known that they may…
In this paper, we propose and analyze an accurate numerical approach to simulate the Helmholtz problem in a bounded region with a random refractive index, where the random refractive index is denoted using an infinite series parameterized…
We investigate Monte Carlo based algorithms for solving stochastic control problems with probabilistic constraints. Our motivation comes from microgrid management, where the controller tries to optimally dispatch a diesel generator while…
We consider the problem of estimating the density of a random variable $X$ that can be sampled exactly by Monte Carlo (MC). We investigate the effectiveness of replacing MC by randomized quasi Monte Carlo (RQMC) or by stratified sampling…
We study the application of a tailored quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) method to a class of optimal control problems subject to parabolic partial differential equation (PDE) constraints under uncertainty: the state in our setting is the solution of…
Sequential Monte Carlo algorithms (also known as particle filters) are popular methods to approximate filtering (and related) distributions of state-space models. However, they converge at the slow $1/\sqrt{N}$ rate, which may be an issue…