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It is commonly admitted that non-reversible Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms usually yield more accurate MCMC estimators than their reversible counterparts. In this note, we show that in addition to their variance reduction…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) proves to be powerful for Bayesian inference and in particular for exoplanet radial velocity fitting because MCMC provides more statistical information and makes better use of data than common approaches like…

Stochastic gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (SG-MCMC) has been developed as a flexible family of scalable Bayesian sampling algorithms. However, there has been little theoretical analysis of the impact of minibatch size to the algorithm's…

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…

Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) samplers are powerful tools for Bayesian inference but suffer from high computational costs due to their reliance on large particle ensembles for accurate estimates. We introduce persistent sampling (PS), an…

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…

Stochastic approximation Monte Carlo (SAMC) has recently been proposed by Liang, Liu and Carroll [J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 102 (2007) 305--320] as a general simulation and optimization algorithm. In this paper, we propose to improve its…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a commonly used method for approximating expectations with respect to probability distributions. Uncertainty assessment for MCMC estimators is essential in practical applications. Moreover, for…

The Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method is the computational workhorse for Bayesian inverse problems. However, MCMC struggles in high-dimensional parameter spaces, since its iterates must sequentially explore the high-dimensional space.…

Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) is a class of Bayesian inference algorithms that targets for problems with intractable or {unavailable} likelihood function. It uses synthetic data drawn from the simulation model to approximate the…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a popular class of statistical methods for simulating autocorrelated draws from target distributions, including posterior distributions in Bayesian analysis. An important consideration in using simulated…

Exponential random graph models are extremely difficult models to handle from a statistical viewpoint, since their normalising constant, which depends on model parameters, is available only in very trivial cases. We show how inference can…

Evaluating expectations on an Ising model (or Boltzmann machine) is essential for various applications, including statistical machine learning. However, in general, the evaluation is computationally difficult because it involves intractable…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is one of the most useful approaches to scientific computing because of its flexible construction, ease of use and generality. Indeed, MCMC is indispensable for performing Bayesian analysis. Two critical…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are generally regarded as the gold standard technique for Bayesian inference. They are theoretically well-understood and conceptually simple to apply in practice. The drawback of MCMC is that in…

Computing risk measures of a financial portfolio comprising thousands of derivatives is a challenging problem because (a) it involves a nested expectation requiring multiple evaluations of the loss of the financial portfolio for different…

A core problem in statistics and probabilistic machine learning is to compute probability distributions and expectations. This is the fundamental problem of Bayesian statistics and machine learning, which frames all inference as…

Many real-world problems require one to estimate parameters of interest, in a Bayesian framework, from data that are collected sequentially in time. Conventional methods for sampling from posterior distributions, such as {Markov Chain Monte…

We develop a novel Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method that exploits a hierarchy of models of increasing complexity to efficiently generate samples from an unnormalized target distribution. Broadly, the method rewrites the Multilevel…

To sample from a given target distribution, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling relies on constructing an ergodic Markov chain with the target distribution as its invariant measure. For any MCMC method, an important question is how to…