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Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are employed to sample from a given distribution of interest, whenever either the distribution does not exist in closed form, or, if it does, no efficient method to simulate an independent sample from…
Adaptive and interacting Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms (MCMC) have been recently introduced in the literature. These novel simulation algorithms are designed to increase the simulation efficiency to sample complex distributions.…
When working with multimodal Bayesian posterior distributions, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms have difficulty moving between modes, and default variational or mode-based approximate inferences will understate posterior…
Correlation clustering is a central topic in unsupervised learning, with many applications in ML and data mining. In correlation clustering, one receives as input a signed graph and the goal is to partition it to minimize the number of…
Sampling from posterior distributions using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods can require an exhaustive number of iterations, particularly when the posterior is multi-modal as the MCMC sampler can become trapped in a local mode for a…
Divide-and-conquer MCMC is a strategy for parallelising Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling by running independent samplers on disjoint subsets of a dataset and merging their output. An ongoing challenge in the literature is to efficiently…
Target tracking faces the challenge in coping with large volumes of data which requires efficient methods for real time applications. The complexity considered in this paper is when there is a large number of measurements which are required…
Modelling random dynamical systems in continuous time, diffusion processes are a powerful tool in many areas of science. Model parameters can be estimated from time-discretely observed processes using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are foundational algorithms for Bayesian inference and probabilistic modeling. However, most MCMC algorithms are inherently sequential and their time complexity scales linearly with the sequence…
Constructing unbiased estimators from Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) outputs is a difficult problem that has recently received a lot of attention in the statistics and machine learning communities. However, the current unbiased MCMC…
Adding inequality constraints (e.g. boundedness, monotonicity, convexity) into Gaussian processes (GPs) can lead to more realistic stochastic emulators. Due to the truncated Gaussianity of the posterior, its distribution has to be…
We present a general framework for accelerating a large class of widely used Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. Our approach exploits fast, iterative approximations to the target density to speculatively evaluate many potential…
Recent advances in stochastic gradient variational inference have made it possible to perform variational Bayesian inference with posterior approximations containing auxiliary random variables. This enables us to explore a new synthesis of…
Markov jump processes (or continuous-time Markov chains) are a simple and important class of continuous-time dynamical systems. In this paper, we tackle the problem of simulating from the posterior distribution over paths in these models,…
There has been considerable interest in making Bayesian inference more scalable. In big data settings, most literature focuses on reducing the computing time per iteration, with less focused on reducing the number of iterations needed in…
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…
We propose a very fast approximate Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling framework that is applicable to a large class of sparse Bayesian inference problems, where the computational cost per iteration in several models is of order…
This simple note lays out a few observations which are well known in many ways but may not have been said in quite this way before. The basic idea is that when comparing two different Markov chains it is useful to couple them is such a way…
The resolution of many large-scale inverse problems using MCMC methods requires a step of drawing samples from a high dimensional Gaussian distribution. While direct Gaussian sampling techniques, such as those based on Cholesky…
Communication costs, resulting from synchronization requirements during learning, can greatly slow down many parallel machine learning algorithms. In this paper, we present a parallel Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm in which…