Related papers: On importance sampling and independent Metropolis-…
Importance sampling is a Monte Carlo method which designs estimators of expectations under a target distribution using weighted samples from a proposal distribution. When the target distribution is complex, such as multimodal distributions…
Equilibrium systems evolve according to Detailed Balance (DB). This principe guided development of the Monte-Carlo sampling techniques, of which Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithm is the famous representative. It is also known that DB is…
We show that for any multiple-try Metropolis algorithm, one can always accept the proposal and evaluate the importance weight that is needed to correct for the bias without extra computational cost. This results in a general, convenient,…
A classical approach for approximating expectations of functions w.r.t. partially known distributions is to compute the average of function values along a trajectory of a Metropolis-Hastings (MH) Markov chain. A key part in the MH algorithm…
Importance sampling is a popular variance reduction method for Monte Carlo estimation, where a notorious question is how to design good proposal distributions. While in most cases optimal (zero-variance) estimators are theoretically…
Pseudo-marginal Metropolis-Hastings (pmMH) is a versatile algorithm for sampling from target distributions which are not easy to evaluate point-wise. However, pmMH requires good proposal distributions to sample efficiently from the target,…
The Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithm is one of the most widely used Markov Chain Monte Carlo schemes for generating samples from Bayesian posterior distributions. The algorithm is asymptotically exact, flexible and easy to implement.…
Pseudo-marginal Metropolis-Hastings (pmMH) is a powerful method for Bayesian inference in models where the posterior distribution is analytical intractable or computationally costly to evaluate directly. It operates by introducing…
The general applicability and ease of use of the pseudo-marginal Metropolis--Hastings (PMMH) algorithm, and particle Metropolis--Hastings in particular, makes it a popular method for inference on discretely observed Markovian stochastic…
We consider the problem of sampling from a posterior distribution arising in Bayesian inverse problems in science, engineering, and imaging. Our method belongs to the family of independence Metropolis-Hastings (IMH) sampling algorithms,…
The Metropolis-Hastings algorithm allows one to sample asymptotically from any probability distribution $\pi$. There has been recently much work devoted to the development of variants of the MH update which can handle scenarios where such…
We make two closely related theoretical contributions to the use of importance sampling schemes. First, for independent sampling, we prove that the minimax optimal trial distribution coincides with the target if and only if the target…
We consider the approximation of expectations with respect to the distribution of a latent Markov process given noisy measurements. This is known as the smoothing problem and is often approached with particle and Markov chain Monte Carlo…
Adaptive importance sampling is a class of techniques for finding good proposal distributions for importance sampling. Often the proposal distributions are standard probability distributions whose parameters are adapted based on the…
We consider the efficient use of an approximation within Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), with subsequent importance sampling (IS) correction of the Markov chain inexact output, leading to asymptotically exact inference. We detail…
We consider local Markov chain Monte-Carlo algorithms for sampling from the weighted distribution of independent sets with activity $\l$, where the weight of an independent set $I$ is $\l^{|I|}$. A recent result has established that Gibbs…
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…
This paper deals with the Monte-Carlo methods for evaluating expectations of functionals of solutions to McKean-Vlasov Stochastic Differential Equations (MV-SDE) with drifts of super-linear growth. We assume that the MV-SDE is approximated…
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…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have a drawback when working with a target distribution or likelihood function that is computationally expensive to evaluate, specially when working with big data. This paper focuses on…