Related papers: MCMC for multi-modal distributions

In this paper we introduce a new class of multivariate unimodal distributions, motivated by Khintchine's representation. We start by proposing a univariate model, whose support covers all the unimodal distributions on the real line. The…

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…

Multiproposal MCMC (MP-MCMC) algorithms use clouds of proposals to efficiently traverse state spaces and overcome complex target geometries. While MCMC methods are embarrassingly parallel by nature, the non-trivial forms of parallelism…

Efficient sampling of many-dimensional and multimodal density functions is a task of great interest in many research fields. We describe an algorithm that allows parallelizing inherently serial Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling by…

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…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are routinely used to draw samples from distributions with intractable normalization constants. However, standard MCMC algorithms do not apply to doubly-intractable distributions in which there are…

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a powerful Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method for performing approximate inference in complex probabilistic models of continuous variables. In common with many MCMC methods, however, the standard HMC…

Bayesian inference provides a methodology for parameter estimation and uncertainty quantification in machine learning and deep learning methods. Variational inference and Markov Chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC) sampling methods are used to…

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…

Recent advances in stochastic gradient techniques have made it possible to estimate posterior distributions from large datasets via Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). However, when the target posterior is multimodal, mixing performance is…

Multicanonical MCMC (Multicanonical Markov Chain Monte Carlo; Multicanonical Monte Carlo) is discussed as a method of rare event sampling. Starting from a review of the generic framework of importance sampling, multicanonical MCMC is…

Many scientific and engineering problems require to perform Bayesian inferences in function spaces, in which the unknowns are of infinite dimension. In such problems, many standard Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms become arbitrary…

Monte Carlo (MC) sampling methods are widely applied in Bayesian inference, system simulation and optimization problems. The Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are a well-known class of MC methods which generate a Markov chain with…

Monte Carlo integration is a powerful tool for scientific and statistical computation, but faces significant challenges when the integrand is a multi-modal distribution, even when the mode locations are known. This work introduces novel…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are essential tools in computational statistics for sampling from unnormalised probability distributions, but can be fragile when targeting high-dimensional, multimodal, or complex target…

We design and implement a novel algorithm for computing a multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) estimator of the cumulative distribution function of a quantity of interest in problems with random input parameters or initial conditions. Our approach…

Multimodal structures in the sampling density (e.g. two competing phases) can be a serious problem for traditional Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), because correct sampling of the different structures can only be guaranteed for infinite…

Many problems in the physical sciences, machine learning, and statistical inference necessitate sampling from a high-dimensional, multi-modal probability distribution. Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms, the ubiquitous tool for this…

In performing a Bayesian analysis, two difficult problems often emerge. First, in estimating the parameters of some model for the data, the resulting posterior distribution may be multi-modal or exhibit pronounced (curving) degeneracies.…

We consider parallel asynchronous Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling for problems where we can leverage (stochastic) gradients to define continuous dynamics which explore the target distribution. We outline a solution strategy for…