Related papers: On additive averaging kernels for finite Markov ch…
We study the optimization of the expected long-term reward in finite partially observable Markov decision processes over the set of stationary stochastic policies. In the case of deterministic observations, also known as state aggregation,…
In this paper, we study a Markov chain-based stochastic gradient algorithm in general Hilbert spaces, aiming at approximating the optimal solution of a quadratic loss function. We establish probabilistic upper bounds on its convergence. We…
Approximate Bayesian computation methods are useful for generative models with intractable likelihoods. These methods are however sensitive to the dimension of the parameter space, requiring exponentially increasing resources as this…
The Gibbs sampler (GS) is a crucial algorithm for approximating complex calculations, and it is justified by Markov chain theory, the alternating projection theorem, and $I$-projection, separately. We explore the equivalence between these…
This paper considers the speed of convergence (mixing) of a finite Markov kernel $P$ with respect to the Kullback-Leibler divergence (entropy). Given a Markov kernel one defines either a discrete-time Markov chain (with the $n$-step…
The performance of sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) samplers heavily depends on the tuning of the Markov kernels used in the path proposal. For SMC samplers with unadjusted Markov kernels, standard tuning objectives, such as the…
We consider Markov chains on general state spaces in stationary random environment which are defined by a random mapping that is contractive up to a bounded perturbation. We prove their convergence to a limiting law, providing convergence…
We review and provide new proofs of results used to compare the efficiency of estimates generated by reversible MCMC algorithms on a general state space. We provide a full proof of the formula for the asymptotic variance for real-valued…
We propose a greedy mixture reduction algorithm which is capable of pruning mixture components as well as merging them based on the Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD). The algorithm is distinct from the well-known Runnalls' KLD based method…
In this paper, we study a notion of local stationarity for discrete time Markov chains which is useful for applications in statistics. In the spirit of some locally stationary processes introduced in the literature, we consider triangular…
We study the maximum likelihood estimator of density of $n$ independent observations, under the assumption that it is well approximated by a mixture with a large number of components. The main focus is on statistical properties with respect…
Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) has gained popularity over the past few years for the analysis of complex models arising in population genetic, epidemiology and system biology. Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) approaches have become work…
We propose a method to fuse posterior distributions learned from heterogeneous datasets. Our algorithm relies on a mean field assumption for both the fused model and the individual dataset posteriors and proceeds using a simple…
We provide a new method to approximate a (possibly discontinuous) function using Christoffel-Darboux kernels. Our knowledge about the unknown multivariate function is in terms of finitely many moments of the Young measure supported on the…
While pseudospectral (PS) methods can feature very high accuracy, they tend to be severely limited in terms of geometric flexibility. Application of global radial basis functions overcomes this, however at the expense of problematic…
Bayesian optimization relies on iteratively constructing and optimizing an acquisition function. The latter turns out to be a challenging, non-convex optimization problem itself. Despite the relative importance of this step, most algorithms…
We present a data-driven method for computing approximate forward reachable sets using separating kernels in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space. We frame the problem as a support estimation problem, and learn a classifier of the support as…
A central challenge in Bayesian inference is efficiently approximating posterior distributions. Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a popular variational inference method which transports a set of particles to approximate a target…
Motivated by decentralized approaches to machine learning, we propose a collaborative Bayesian learning algorithm taking the form of decentralized Langevin dynamics in a non-convex setting. Our analysis show that the initial KL-divergence…
Generalized Gibbs kernels are those that may take any direction not necessarily bounded to each axis along the parameters of the objective function. We study how to optimally choose such directions in a Directional, random scan, Gibbs…