Related papers: From Minimax Optimal Importance Sampling to Unifor…
To efficiently evaluate system reliability based on Monte Carlo simulation, importance sampling is used widely. The optimal importance sampling density was derived in 1950s for the deterministic simulation model, which maps an input to an…
Elliptical slice sampling is a widely used gradient-free Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm that is tuning-free and capable of adapting to local characteristics of the target distribution. However, its primary limitation is that sampling…
We describe ergodic properties of some Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithms for heavy-tailed target distributions. The analysis usually falls into sub-geometric ergodicity framework but we prove that the mixed preconditioned Crank-Nicolson…
Statistical signal processing applications usually require the estimation of some parameters of interest given a set of observed data. These estimates are typically obtained either by solving a multi-variate optimization problem, as in the…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are a powerful tool for computation with complex probability distributions. However the performance of such methods is critically dependant on properly tuned parameters, most of which are difficult if…
This paper proposes a new sampling scheme based on Langevin dynamics that is applicable within pseudo-marginal and particle Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms. We investigate this algorithm's theoretical properties under standard…
Statistical inference methods are fundamentally important in machine learning. Most state-of-the-art inference algorithms are variants of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) or variational inference (VI). However, both methods struggle with…
Monte Carlo methods represent the "de facto" standard for approximating complicated integrals involving multidimensional target distributions. In order to generate random realizations from the target distribution, Monte Carlo techniques use…
This paper provides an introductory overview of how one may employ importance sampling effectively as a tool for solving stochastic optimization formulations incorporating tail risk measures such as Conditional Value-at-Risk. Approximating…
The particle Gibbs (PG) sampler is a systematic way of using a particle filter within Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). This results in an off-the-shelf Markov kernel on the space of state trajectories, which can be used to simulate from the…
Learning the minimum/maximum mean among a finite set of distributions is a fundamental sub-task in planning, game tree search and reinforcement learning. We formalize this learning task as the problem of sequentially testing how the minimum…
The problem of optimally scaling the proposal distribution in a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm is critical to the quality of the generated samples. Much work has gone into obtaining such results for various Metropolis-Hastings (MH)…
It has become increasingly easy nowadays to collect approximate posterior samples via fast algorithms such as variational Bayes, but concerns exist about the estimation accuracy. It is tempting to build solutions that exploit approximate…
In engineering examples, one often encounters the need to sample from unnormalized distributions with complex shapes that may also be implicitly defined through a physical or numerical simulation model, making it computationally expensive…
We consider the problem of approximating the stationary distribution of an ergodic Markov chain given a set of sampled transitions. Classical simulation-based approaches assume access to the underlying process so that trajectories of…
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…
Markov chain (MC) algorithms are ubiquitous in machine learning and statistics and many other disciplines. Typically, these algorithms can be formulated as acceptance rejection methods. In this work we present a novel estimator applicable…
In dense Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi random graphs, we are interested in the events where large numbers of a given subgraph occur. The mean behavior of subgraph counts is known, and only recently were the related large deviations results discovered.…
Adaptive Monte Carlo methods are very efficient techniques designed to tune simulation estimators on-line. In this work, we present an alternative to stochastic approximation to tune the optimal change of measure in the context of…
We propose a new method called the Metropolis-adjusted Mirror Langevin algorithm for approximate sampling from distributions whose support is a compact and convex set. This algorithm adds an accept-reject filter to the Markov chain induced…