Related papers: Faster parallel MCMC: Metropolis adjustment is bes…

Thompson sampling for multi-armed bandit problems is known to enjoy favorable performance in both theory and practice. However, it suffers from a significant limitation computationally, arising from the need for samples from posterior…

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo and underdamped Langevin Monte Carlo are state-of-the-art methods for taking samples from high-dimensional distributions with a differentiable density function. To generate samples, they numerically integrate…

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…

We introduce a new family of MCMC samplers that combine auxiliary variables, Gibbs sampling and Taylor expansions of the target density. Our approach permits the marginalisation over the auxiliary variables yielding marginal samplers, or…

The ability to generate samples of the random effects from their conditional distributions is fundamental for inference in mixed effects models. Random walk Metropolis is widely used to conduct such sampling, but such a method can converge…

In this paper we consider fully Bayesian inference in general state space models. Existing particle Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms use an augmented model that takes into account all the variable sampled in a sequential Monte…

Mean-field, ensemble-chain, and adaptive samplers have historically been viewed as distinct approaches to Monte Carlo sampling. In this paper, we present a unifying {two-system} framework that brings all three under one roof. In our…

Motivated by the physics of strings and branes, we develop a class of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms involving extended objects. Starting from a collection of parallel Metropolis-Hastings (MH) samplers, we place them on an…

We present Automatic Laplace Collapsed Sampling (ALCS), a general framework for marginalising latent parameters in Bayesian models using automatic differentiation, which we combine with nested sampling to explore the hyperparameter space in…

Standard MCMC methods can scale poorly to big data settings due to the need to evaluate the likelihood at each iteration. There have been a number of approximate MCMC algorithms that use sub-sampling ideas to reduce this computational…

We propose an efficient Markov Chain Monte Carlo method for sampling equilibrium distributions for stochastic lattice models, capable of handling correctly long and short-range particle interactions. The proposed method is a Metropolis-type…

We give lower bounds on the performance of two of the most popular sampling methods in practice, the Metropolis-adjusted Langevin algorithm (MALA) and multi-step Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) with a leapfrog integrator, when applied to…

I show how Markov chain sampling with the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm can be modified so as to take bigger steps when the distribution being sampled from has the characteristic that its density can be quickly recomputed for a new point if…

Uncertainty estimation is a key issue when considering the application of deep neural network methods in science and engineering. In this work, we introduce a novel algorithm that quantifies epistemic uncertainty via Monte Carlo sampling…

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…

Monte Carlo (MC) methods for numerical integration seem to be embarassingly parallel on first sight. When adaptive schemes are applied in order to enhance convergence however, the seemingly most natural way of replicating the whole job on…

We introduce a gradient-based learning method to automatically adapt Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) proposal distributions to intractable targets. We define a maximum entropy regularised objective function, referred to as generalised speed…

The posterior probability distribution for a set of model parameters encodes all that the data have to tell us in the context of a given model; it is the fundamental quantity for Bayesian parameter estimation. In order to infer the…

State-space models (SSMs) are commonly used to model time series data where the observations depend on an unobserved latent process. However, inference on the model parameters of an SSM can be challenging, especially when the likelihood of…

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…