Related papers: Zeroth-order parallel sampling
Stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (SG-MCMC) methods are Bayesian analogs to popular stochastic optimization methods; however, this connection is not well studied. We explore this relationship by applying simulated annealing to an…
Smoothing in state-space models amounts to computing the conditional distribution of the latent state trajectory, given observations, or expectations of functionals of the state trajectory with respect to this distributions. For models that…
Posterior sampling is a task of central importance in Bayesian inference. For many applications in Bayesian meta-analysis and Bayesian transfer learning, the prior distribution is unknown and needs to be estimated from samples. In practice,…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are widely used to sample from complicated distributions, especially to sample from the posterior distribution in Bayesian inference. However, MCMC is not directly applicable when facing the doubly…
We propose a generic Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm to speed up computations for datasets with many observations. A key feature of our approach is the use of the highly efficient difference estimator from the survey sampling…
In this paper, we propose and analyze algorithms for zeroth-order optimization of non-convex composite objectives, focusing on reducing the complexity dependence on dimensionality. This is achieved by exploiting the low dimensional…
Recently there have been exciting developments in Monte Carlo methods, with the development of new MCMC and sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithms which are based on continuous-time, rather than discrete-time, Markov processes. This has…
Integration over non-negative integrands is a central problem in machine learning (e.g. for model averaging, (hyper-)parameter marginalisation, and computing posterior predictive distributions). Bayesian Quadrature is a probabilistic…
This article considers the sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) approximation of ratios of normalizing constants associated to posterior distributions which in principle rely on continuum models. Therefore, the Monte Carlo estimation error and the…
Zeroth-order optimization (ZO) has been a powerful framework for solving black-box problems, which estimates gradients using zeroth-order data to update variables iteratively. The practical applicability of ZO critically depends on the…
It is widely known that the performance of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) can degrade quickly when targeting computationally expensive posterior distributions, such as when the sample size is large. This has motivated the search for MCMC…
The celebrated Monte Carlo method estimates an expensive-to-compute quantity by random sampling. Bandit-based Monte Carlo optimization is a general technique for computing the minimum of many such expensive-to-compute quantities by adaptive…
We propose new sequential sorting operations by adapting techniques and methods used for designing parallel sorting algorithms. Although the norm is to parallelize a sequential algorithm to improve performance, we adapt a contrarian…
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…
We consider a class of finite time horizon nonlinear stochastic optimal control problem, where the control acts additively on the dynamics and the control cost is quadratic. This framework is flexible and has found applications in many…
Bayesian max-margin models have shown superiority in various practical applications, such as text categorization, collaborative prediction, social network link prediction and crowdsourcing, and they conjoin the flexibility of Bayesian…
In this work we propose a hierarchy of Monte Carlo methods for sampling equilibrium properties of stochastic lattice systems with competing short and long range interactions. Each Monte Carlo step is composed by two or more sub - steps…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have a drawback when working with a target distribution or likelihood function that is computationally expensive to evaluate, specially when working with big data. This paper focuses on…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo is a widely used algorithm for sampling from posterior distributions of complex Bayesian models. It can efficiently explore high-dimensional parameter spaces guided by simulated Hamiltonian flows. However, the…
For big data analysis, high computational cost for Bayesian methods often limits their applications in practice. In recent years, there have been many attempts to improve computational efficiency of Bayesian inference. Here we propose an…