Related papers: MCMC for multi-modal distributions

We describe and analyze some Monte Carlo methods for manifolds in Euclidean space defined by equality and inequality constraints. First, we give an MCMC sampler for probability distributions defined by un-normalized densities on such…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a powerful methodology for the approximation of posterior distributions. However, the iterative nature of MCMC does not naturally facilitate its use with modern highly parallel computation on HPC and cloud…

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…

We propose nested sequential Monte Carlo (NSMC), a methodology to sample from sequences of probability distributions, even where the random variables are high-dimensional. NSMC generalises the SMC framework by requiring only approximate,…

We propose a novel approximate inference algorithm that approximates a target distribution by amortising the dynamics of a user-selected MCMC sampler. The idea is to initialise MCMC using samples from an approximation network, apply the…

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) samples efficiently from high-dimensional posterior distributions with proposed parameter draws obtained by iterating on a discretized version of the Hamiltonian dynamics. The iterations make HMC…

We propose a new Monte Carlo algorithm for complex discrete distributions. The algorithm is motivated by the N-Fold Way, which is an ingenious event-driven MCMC sampler that avoids rejection moves at any specific state. The N-Fold Way can…

Over the last decades, various "non-linear" MCMC methods have arisen. While appealing for their convergence speed and efficiency, their practical implementation and theoretical study remain challenging. In this paper, we introduce a…

The main goal of this paper is to investigate continuous-time distributed dynamic programming (DP) algorithms for networked multi-agent Markov decision problems (MAMDPs). In our study, we adopt a distributed multi-agent framework where…

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) algorithms which combine numerical approximation of Hamiltonian dynamics on finite intervals with stochastic refreshment and Metropolis correction are popular sampling schemes, but it is known that they may…

Many applications in signal processing require the estimation of some parameters of interest given a set of observed data. More specifically, Bayesian inference needs the computation of {\it a-posteriori} estimators which are often…

A generalized approach to Wang-Landau simulations, macroscopically constrained Wang-Landau, is proposed to simulate the density of states of a system with multiple macroscopic order parameters. The method breaks a multidimensional…

We consider conditional tests for non-negative discrete exponential families. We develop two Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms which allow us to sample from the conditional space and to perform approximated tests. The first…

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…

In lattice quantum field theory studies, parameters defining the lattice theory must be tuned toward criticality to access continuum physics. Commonly used Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods suffer from critical slowing down in this…

Multimodal multi-objective problems (MMOPs) commonly arise in real-world problems where distant solutions in decision space correspond to very similar objective values. To obtain all solutions for MMOPs, many multimodal multi-objective…

This paper derives two new optimization-driven Monte Carlo algorithms inspired from variable splitting and data augmentation. In particular, the formulation of one of the proposed approaches is closely related to the alternating direction…

The computational complexity of naive, sampling-based uncertainty quantification for 3D partial differential equations is extremely high. Multilevel approaches, such as multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC), can reduce the complexity significantly,…

We introduce a powerful and flexible MCMC algorithm for stochastic simulation. The method builds on a pseudo-marginal method originally introduced in [Genetics 164 (2003) 1139--1160], showing how algorithms which are approximations to an…

We compare convergence rates of Metropolis--Hastings chains to multi-modal target distributions when the proposal distributions can be of ``local'' and ``small world'' type. In particular, we show that by adding occasional long-range jumps…