Related papers: From Minimax Optimal Importance Sampling to Unifor…
We show that for any multiple-try Metropolis algorithm, one can always accept the proposal and evaluate the importance weight that is needed to correct for the bias without extra computational cost. This results in a general, convenient,…
We consider importance sampling as well as other properly weighted samples with respect to a target distribution $\pi$ from a different point of view. By considering the associated weights as sojourn times until the next jump, we define…
Simulated tempering (ST) is an established Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method for sampling from a multimodal density $\pi(\theta)$. Typically, ST involves introducing an auxiliary variable $k$ taking values in a finite subset of $[0,1]$…
Importance sampling is a Monte Carlo method that introduces a proposal distribution to sample the space according to the target distribution. Yet calibration of the proposal distribution is essential to achieving efficiency, thus the resort…
Calculating averages with respect to multimodal probability distributions is often necessary in applications. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods to this end, which are based on time averages along a realization of a Markov process…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods to sample from a probability distribution $\pi$ defined on a space $(\Theta,\mathcal{T})$ consist of the simulation of realisations of Markov chains $\{\theta_{n},n\geq1\}$ of invariant distribution…
Importance sampling and independent Metropolis-Hastings (IMH) are among the fundamental building blocks of Monte Carlo methods. Both require a proposal distribution that globally approximates the target distribution. The Radon-Nikodym…
The Importance Markov chain is a novel algorithm bridging the gap between rejection sampling and importance sampling, moving from one to the other through a tuning parameter. Based on a modified sample of an instrumental Markov chain…
In this paper we study the ergodicity properties of some adaptive Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms (MCMC) that have been recently proposed in the literature. We prove that under a set of verifiable conditions, ergodic averages calculated…
Informed Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have been proposed as scalable solutions to Bayesian posterior computation on high-dimensional discrete state spaces, but theoretical results about their convergence behavior in general…
We present an importance sampling algorithm that can produce realisations of Markovian epidemic models that exactly match observations, taken to be the number of a single event type over a period of time. The importance sampling can be used…
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…
Although overparameterized models have shown their success on many machine learning tasks, the accuracy could drop on the testing distribution that is different from the training one. This accuracy drop still limits applying machine…
Importance sampling is a variance reduction technique for efficient estimation of rare-event probabilities by Monte Carlo. In standard importance sampling schemes, the system is simulated using an a priori fixed change of measure suggested…
The Metropolis-Hastings algorithm is a fundamental Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method for sampling and inference. With the advent of Big Data, distributed and parallel variants of MCMC methods are attracting increased attention. In this…
Importance sampling is a Monte Carlo method which designs estimators of expectations under a target distribution using weighted samples from a proposal distribution. When the target distribution is complex, such as multimodal distributions…
Simulated annealing - moving from a tractable distribution to a distribution of interest via a sequence of intermediate distributions - has traditionally been used as an inexact method of handling isolated modes in Markov chain samplers.…
The Metropolis-Hastings algorithm allows one to sample asymptotically from any probability distribution $\pi$. There has been recently much work devoted to the development of variants of the MH update which can handle scenarios where such…
We introduce a theoretical and practical framework for efficient importance sampling of mini-batch samples for gradient estimation from single and multiple probability distributions. To handle noisy gradients, our framework dynamically…
A classical approach for approximating expectations of functions w.r.t. partially known distributions is to compute the average of function values along a trajectory of a Metropolis-Hastings (MH) Markov chain. A key part in the MH algorithm…