Related papers: Accelerated Markov Chain Monte Carlo Using Adaptiv…
Monte Carlo methods represent the "de facto" standard for approximating complicated integrals involving multidimensional target distributions. In order to generate random realizations from the target distribution, Monte Carlo techniques use…
Inference after model selection presents computational challenges when dealing with intractable conditional distributions. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a common method for sampling from these distributions, but its slow convergence…
Gaussian Markov random fields (GMRFs) are popular for modeling dependence in large areal datasets due to their ease of interpretation and computational convenience afforded by the sparse precision matrices needed for random variable…
Many machine learning applications require operating on a spatially distributed dataset. Despite technological advances, privacy considerations and communication constraints may prevent gathering the entire dataset in a central unit. In…
MCMC methods (Monte Carlo Markov Chain) are a class of methods used to perform simulations per a probability distribution $P$. These methods are often used when we have difficulties to directly sample per a given probability distribution…
The independence sampler is one of the most commonly used MCMC algorithms usually as a component of a Metropolis-within-Gibbs algorithm. The common focus for the independence sampler is on the choice of proposal distribution to obtain an as…
This paper deals with Gibbs samplers that include high dimensional conditional Gaussian distributions. It proposes an efficient algorithm that avoids the high dimensional Gaussian sampling and relies on a random excursion along a small set…
We describe a general strategy for sampling configurations from a given distribution, NOT based on the standard Metropolis (Markov chain) strategy. It uses the fact that nontrivial problems in statistical physics are high dimensional and…
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…
This paper deals with a complete bipartite matching problem with the objective of finding an optimal matching that maximizes a certain generic predefined utility function on the set of all matchings. After proving the NP-hardness of the…
Finite mixture models are frequently used to uncover latent structures in high-dimensional datasets (e.g.\ identifying clusters of patients in electronic health records). The inference of such structures can be performed in a Bayesian…
We introduce Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms based on numerical approximations of piecewise-deterministic Markov processes obtained with the framework of splitting schemes. We present unadjusted as well as adjusted algorithms,…
We study the convergence properties of the Gibbs Sampler in the context of posterior distributions arising from Bayesian analysis of conditionally Gaussian hierarchical models. We develop a multigrid approach to derive analytic expressions…
Recent advances in Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) extend the scope of Bayesian inference to models for which the likelihood function is intractable. Although these developments allow us to estimate model parameters, other basic problems…
The Griddy Gibbs sampling was proposed by Ritter and Tanner (1992) as a computationally efficient approximation of the well-known Gibbs sampling method. The algorithm is simple and effective and has been used successfully to address…
The reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo (RJMCMC) method offers an across-model simulation approach for Bayesian estimation and model comparison, by exploring the sampling space that consists of several models of possibly varying…
Model comparison for the purposes of selection, averaging and validation is a problem found throughout statistics. Within the Bayesian paradigm, these problems all require the calculation of the posterior probabilities of models within a…
For large scale on-line inference problems the update strategy is critical for performance. We derive an adaptive scan Gibbs sampler that optimizes the update frequency by selecting an optimum mini-batch size. We demonstrate performance of…
Sampling from Gibbs distribution is a central problem in computer science as well as in statistical physics. In this work we focus on the k-colouring model} and the hard-core model with fugacity \lambda when the underlying graph is an…
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…