Related papers: On randomized step sizes in Metropolis-Hastings al…
We examine challenges to sampling from Boltzmann distributions associated with multiscale energy landscapes. The multiscale features, or "roughness," corresponds to highly oscillatory, but bounded, perturbations of a smooth landscape.…
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 study decentralized learning over networks where data are distributed across nodes without a central coordinator. Random walk learning is a token-based approach in which a single model is propagated across the network and updated at each…
We propose an adaptive Metropolis-Hastings algorithm in which sampled data are used to update the proposal distribution. We use the samples found by the algorithm at a particular step to form the information-theoretically optimal mean-field…
Parallel tempering is a generic Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling method which allows good mixing with multimodal target distributions, where conventional Metropolis-Hastings algorithms often fail. The mixing properties of the sampler…
We consider the least-squares regression problem and provide a detailed asymptotic analysis of the performance of averaged constant-step-size stochastic gradient descent (a.k.a. least-mean-squares). In the strongly-convex case, we provide…
Probabilistic modeling provides the capability to represent and manipulate uncertainty in data, models, predictions and decisions. We are concerned with the problem of learning probabilistic models of dynamical systems from measured data.…
In this paper, we consider sampling from a class of distributions with thin tails supported on $\mathbb{R}^d$ and make two primary contributions. First, we propose a new Metropolized Algorithm With Optimization Step (MAO), which is well…
We propose randomized subspace gradient methods for high-dimensional constrained optimization. While there have been similarly purposed studies on unconstrained optimization problems, there have been few on constrained optimization problems…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are one of the most popular classes of algorithms for sampling from a target probability distribution. A rising trend in recent years consists in analyzing the convergence of MCMC algorithms using…
The Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithm is the prototype for a class of Markov chain Monte Carlo methods that propose transitions between states and then accept or reject the proposal. These methods generate a correlated sequence of random…
It is commonly admitted that non-reversible Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms usually yield more accurate MCMC estimators than their reversible counterparts. In this note, we show that in addition to their variance reduction…
In this paper we study the effect of stochastic errors on two constrained incremental sub-gradient algorithms. We view the incremental sub-gradient algorithms as decentralized network optimization algorithms as applied to minimize a sum of…
Couplings play a central role in contemporary Markov chain Monte Carlo methods and in the analysis of their convergence to stationarity. In most cases, a coupling must induce relatively fast meeting between chains to ensure good…
Traditional methods for unsupervised learning of finite mixture models require to evaluate the likelihood of all components of the mixture. This becomes computationally prohibitive when the number of components is large, as it is, for…
In this paper, we shall optimize the efficiency of Metropolis algorithms for multidimensional target distributions with scaling terms possibly depending on the dimension. We propose a method for determining the appropriate form for the…
Equilibrium systems evolve according to Detailed Balance (DB). This principe guided development of the Monte-Carlo sampling techniques, of which Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithm is the famous representative. It is also known that DB is…
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…
We consider a pseudo-marginal Metropolis--Hastings kernel $P_m$ that is constructed using an average of $m$ exchangeable random variables, as well as an analogous kernel $P_s$ that averages $s<m$ of these same random variables. Using an…
Selecting the step size for the Metropolis-adjusted Langevin algorithm (MALA) is necessary in order to obtain satisfactory performance. However, finding an adequate step size for an arbitrary target distribution can be a difficult task and…