Related papers: Efficiently learning and sampling multimodal distr…
Many applications in network analysis require algorithms to sample uniformly at random from the set of all graphs with a prescribed degree sequence. We present a Markov chain based approach which converges to the uniform distribution of all…
We give conditions under which a Markov chain constructed via parallel or simulated tempering is guaranteed to be rapidly mixing, which are applicable to a wide range of multimodal distributions arising in Bayesian statistical inference and…
In this work, we study how to efficiently obtain perfect samples from a discrete distribution $\mathcal{D}$ given access only to pairwise comparisons of elements of its support. Specifically, we assume access to samples $(x, S)$, where $S$…
We consider stochastic optimization problems where data is drawn from a Markov chain. Existing methods for this setting crucially rely on knowing the mixing time of the chain, which in real-world applications is usually unknown. We propose…
We can directly sample from the conditional distribution of any log-affine model. The algorithm is a Markov chain on a bounded integer lattice, and its transition probability is the ratio of the UMVUE (uniformly minimum variance unbiased…
Markov chain sampling methods that automatically adapt to characteristics of the distribution being sampled can be constructed by exploiting the principle that one can sample from a distribution by sampling uniformly from the region under…
Focusing on stochastic systems arising in mean-field models, the systems under consideration belong to the class of switching diffusions, in which continuous dynamics and discrete events coexist and interact. The discrete events are modeled…
We establish a simple variance inequality for U-statistics whose underlying sequence of random variables is an ergodic Markov Chain. The constants in this inequality are explicit and depend on computable bounds on the mixing rate of the…
In this paper we consider the problem of sampling from the low-temperature exponential random graph model (ERGM). The usual approach is via Markov chain Monte Carlo, but Bhamidi et al. showed that any local Markov chain suffers from an…
We show that efficient approximate sampling algorithms, combined with a slow exponential time oracle for computing its output distribution, can be combined into constructing efficient perfect samplers, which sample exactly from a target…
Sampling from distributions play a crucial role in aiding practitioners with statistical inference. However, in numerous situations, obtaining exact samples from complex distributions is infeasible. Consequently, researchers often turn to…
This work considers the problem of learning the Markov parameters of a linear system from observed data. Recent non-asymptotic system identification results have characterized the sample complexity of this problem in the single and…
Switching dynamical systems are an expressive model class for the analysis of time-series data. As in many fields within the natural and engineering sciences, the systems under study typically evolve continuously in time, it is natural to…
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…
We obtain a perfect sampling characterization of weak ergodicity for backward products of finite stochastic matrices, and equivalently, simultaneous tail triviality of the corresponding nonhomogeneous Markov chains. Applying these ideas to…
When statistical analyses consider multiple data sources, Markov melding provides a method for combining the source-specific Bayesian models. Markov melding joins together submodels that have a common quantity. One challenge is that the…
Consider a low temperature stochastic Ising model in the phase coexistence regime with Markov semigroup $P_t$. A fundamental and still largely open problem is the understanding of the long time behavior of $\d_\h P_t$ when the initial…
The problem of efficiently sampling from a set of(undirected) graphs with a given degree sequence has many applications. One approach to this problem uses a simple Markov chain, which we call the switch chain, to perform the sampling. The…
In this work, we propose a first-order sampling method called the Metropolis-adjusted Preconditioned Langevin Algorithm for approximate sampling from a target distribution whose support is a proper convex subset of $\mathbb{R}^{d}$. Our…
We develop a modular approach to Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling for unnormalized target densities. In this approach, Markov chains are constructed in parallel, each constrained to a subset of the target space. The Monte Carlo…