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We present a new framework to derandomise certain Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. As in MCMC, we first reduce counting problems to sampling from a sequence of marginal distributions. For the latter task, we introduce a method…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-04-05 Weiming Feng , Heng Guo , Chunyang Wang , Jiaheng Wang , Yitong Yin

Many machine learning applications require operating on a spatially distributed dataset. Despite technological advances, privacy considerations and communication constraints may prevent gathering the entire dataset in a central unit. In…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-01-30 Alexandros E. Tzikas , Licio Romao , Mert Pilanci , Alessandro Abate , Mykel J. Kochenderfer

Various Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are studied to improve upon random walk Metropolis sampling, for simulation from complex distributions. Examples include Metropolis-adjusted Langevin algorithms, Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, and…

Computation · Statistics 2020-05-19 Zexi Song , Zhiqiang Tan

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are widely used in machine learning. One of the major problems with MCMC is the question of how to design chains that mix fast over the whole state space; in particular, how to select the parameters…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-16 Kiarash Shaloudegi , András György

Atomistic simulations provide valuable insights into the physical processes governing material behavior. However, their applicability is fundamentally constrained by the limited time scales accessible to brute-force simulations. This…

Computational Physics · Physics 2026-02-16 Michael Kim , Wei Cai

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are commonly used for their versatility in sampling from complicated probability distributions. However, as the dimension of the distribution gets larger, the computational costs for a satisfactory…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2020-12-01 Hector J. Hortua , Riccardo Volpi , Dimitri Marinelli , Luigi Malago

Monte Carlo sampling techniques have broad applications in machine learning, Bayesian posterior inference, and parameter estimation. Often the target distribution takes the form of a product distribution over a dataset with a large number…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-09-19 Charles Matthews , Jonathan Weare

Bayesian modelling and computational inference by Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a principled framework for large-scale uncertainty quantification, though is limited in practice by computational cost when implemented in the simplest…

Computation · Statistics 2020-09-21 Colin Fox , Tiangang Cui , Markus Neumayer

We explain the fundamental challenges of sampling from multimodal distributions, particularly for high-dimensional problems. We present the major types of MCMC algorithms that are designed for this purpose, including parallel tempering,…

Computation · Statistics 2025-01-13 Krzysztof Łatuszyński , Matthew T. Moores , Timothée Stumpf-Fétizon

Sampling from complicated probability distributions is a hard computational problem arising in many fields, including statistical physics, optimization, and machine learning. Quantum computers have recently been used to sample from…

In this article we propose a novel MCMC method based on deterministic transformations T: X x D --> X where X is the state-space and D is some set which may or may not be a subset of X. We refer to our new methodology as Transformation-based…

Computation · Statistics 2013-10-21 Somak Dutta , Sourabh Bhattacharya

Many Bayesian inference problems require exploring the posterior distribution of high-dimensional parameters that represent the discretization of an underlying function. This work introduces a family of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)…

Computation · Statistics 2016-05-03 Tiangang Cui , Kody J. H. Law , Youssef M. Marzouk

We consider Metropolis Hastings MCMC in cases where the log of the ratio of target distributions is replaced by an estimator. The estimator is based on m samples from an independent online Monte Carlo simulation. Under some conditions on…

Computation · Statistics 2012-06-01 Geoff K. Nicholls , Colin Fox , Alexis Muir Watt

In parameter estimation problems one computes a posterior distribution over uncertain parameters defined jointly by a prior distribution, a model, and noisy data. Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is often used for the numerical solution of…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2017-11-15 Matthias Morzfeld , Marcus S. Day , Ray W. Grout , George Shu Heng Pau , Stefan A. Finsterle , John B. Bell

We provide a pedagogical introduction to the two main variants of real-space quantum Monte Carlo methods for electronic-structure calculations: variational Monte Carlo (VMC) and diffusion Monte Carlo (DMC). Assuming no prior knowledge on…

Chemical Physics · Physics 2015-08-13 Julien Toulouse , Roland Assaraf , C. J. Umrigar

We propose a new class of learning algorithms that combines variational approximation and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation. Naive algorithms that use the variational approximation as proposal distribution can perform poorly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-01-14 Nando de Freitas , Pedro Hojen-Sorensen , Michael I. Jordan , Stuart Russell

Sampling from high dimensional distributions is a computational bottleneck in many scientific applications. Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC), and in particular the No-U-Turn Sampler (NUTS), are widely used, yet they struggle on problems with a…

Computation · Statistics 2025-05-20 Jakob Robnik , Reuben Cohn-Gordon , Uroš Seljak

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a powerful method for drawing samples from non-standard probability distributions and is utilized across many fields and disciplines. Methods such as Metropolis-Adjusted Langevin (MALA) and Hamiltonian…

Computation · Statistics 2024-10-28 Lee Devlin , Paul Horridge , Peter L. Green , Simon Maskell

Evaluating the degree of partisan districting (Gerrymandering) in a statistical framework typically requires an ensemble of districting plans which are drawn from a prescribed probability distribution that adheres to a realistic and…

Computation · Statistics 2020-08-19 Gregory Herschlag , Jonathan C. Mattingly , Matthias Sachs , Evan Wyse

We propose a sequential Markov chain Monte Carlo (SMCMC) algorithm to sample from a sequence of probability distributions, corresponding to posterior distributions at different times in on-line applications. SMCMC proceeds as in usual MCMC…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2013-08-20 Yun Yang , David B. Dunson