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Deriving Bayesian inference for exponential random graph models (ERGMs) is a challenging "doubly intractable" problem as the normalizing constants of the likelihood and posterior density are both intractable. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)…

Despite the enormous success of Hamiltonian Monte Carlo and related Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, sampling often still represents the computational bottleneck in scientific applications. Availability of parallel resources can…

We outline a procedure for jointly sampling substitution matrices and multiple sequence alignments, according to an approximate posterior distribution, using an MCMC-based algorithm. This procedure provides an efficient and simple method by…

Boson sampling is a promising candidate for quantum supremacy. It requires to sample from a complicated distribution, and is trusted to be intractable on classical computers. Among the various classical sampling methods, the Markov chain…

Inferring directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) from data via Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is computationally challenging in moderate-to-high dimensional settings because their discrete sampling space grows super-exponentially with the number…

The Markov Chain Monte Carlo method is the dominant paradigm for posterior computation in Bayesian analysis. It is common to control computation time by making approximations to the Markov transition kernel. Comparatively little attention…

In Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulations, the thermal equilibria quantities are estimated by ensemble average over a sample set containing a large number of correlated samples. These samples are selected in accordance with the…

Making good predictions of a physical system using a computer code requires the inputs to be carefully specified. Some of these inputs called control variables have to reproduce physical conditions whereas other inputs, called parameters,…

Bayesian inference for Markov processes has become increasingly relevant in recent years. Problems of this type often have intractable likelihoods and prior knowledge about model rate parameters is often poor. Markov Chain Monte Carlo…

Sequential optimization methods are often confronted with the curse of dimensionality in high-dimensional spaces. Current approaches under the Gaussian process framework are still burdened by the computational complexity of tracking…

We demonstrate the use of a variational method to determine a quantitative lower bound on the rate of convergence of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms as a function of the target density and proposal density. The bound relies on…

We consider importance sampling (IS) type weighted estimators based on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) targeting an approximate marginal of the target distribution. In the context of Bayesian latent variable models, the MCMC typically…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is the predominant tool used in Bayesian parameter estimation for hierarchical models. When the model expands due to an increasing number of hierarchical levels, number of groups at a particular level, or…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are algorithms for sampling probability distributions, commonly applied to the Boltzmann distribution in physical and chemical models such as protein folding and the Ising model. These methods enable…

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a powerful Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm for estimating expectations with respect to continuous un-normalized probability distributions. MCMC estimators typically have higher variance than…

This paper proposes a new sampling-based nonlinear model predictive control (MPC) algorithm, with a bound on complexity quadratic in the prediction horizon N and linear in the number of samples. The idea of the proposed algorithm is to use…

Many machine learning problems involve Monte Carlo gradient estimators. As a prominent example, we focus on Monte Carlo variational inference (MCVI) in this paper. The performance of MCVI crucially depends on the variance of its stochastic…

Monte Carlo (MC) sampling algorithms are an extremely widely-used technique to estimate expectations of functions f(x), especially in high dimensions. Control variates are a very powerful technique to reduce the error of such estimates, but…

The particle Gibbs sampler is a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm to sample from the full posterior distribution of a state-space model. It does so by executing Gibbs sampling steps on an extended target distribution defined on the…

Standard MCMC methods can scale poorly to big data settings due to the need to evaluate the likelihood at each iteration. There have been a number of approximate MCMC algorithms that use sub-sampling ideas to reduce this computational…