Related papers: On additive averaging kernels for finite Markov ch…
This work presents a distributed algorithm for nonlinear adaptive learning. In particular, a set of nodes obtain measurements, sequentially one per time step, which are related via a nonlinear function; their goal is to collectively…
We provide explicit expressions for the constants involved in the characterisation of ergodicity of sub-geometric Markov chains. The constants are determined in terms of those appearing in the assumed drift and one-step minorisation…
In the hard-core model on a finite graph we are given a parameter lambda>0, and an independent set I arises with probability proportional to lambda^|I|. On infinite graphs a Gibbs distribution is defined as a suitable limit with the correct…
Positive semi-definite kernels are used to induce pseudo-metrics, or ``distances'', between measures. We write these as an expected quadratic variation of, or expected inner product between, a random field and the difference of measures.…
Deterministic-scan and random-scan component-wise Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms, such as Gibbs samplers and conditional Metropolis-Hastings, are popular approaches for sampling from multivariate distributions. A long-standing open…
Last decade witnesses significant methodological and theoretical advances in estimating large precision matrices. In particular, there are scientific applications such as longitudinal data, meteorology and spectroscopy in which the ordering…
In this paper, we study the asymptotic variance of sample path averages for inhomogeneous Markov chains that evolve alternatingly according to two different $\pi$-reversible Markov transition kernels $P$ and $Q$. More specifically, our main…
Markov chain methods are remarkably successful in computational physics, machine learning, and combinatorial optimization. The cost of such methods often reduces to the mixing time, i.e., the time required to reach the steady state of the…
Let $\gS=(V,E)$ be a finite, $d$-regular bipartite graph. For any $\lambda>0$ let $\pi_\lambda$ be the probability measure on the independent sets of $\gS$ in which the set $I$ is chosen with probability proportional to $\lambda^{|I|}$…
Gaussian Process (GP) models are often used as mathematical approximations of computationally expensive experiments. Provided that its kernel is suitably chosen and that enough data is available to obtain a reasonable fit of the simulator,…
The time to converge to the steady state of a finite Markov chain can be greatly reduced by a lifting operation, which creates a new Markov chain on an expanded state space. For a class of quadratic objectives, we show an analogous behavior…
This paper shows that large nonparametric classes of conditional multivariate densities can be approximated in the Kullback--Leibler distance by different specifications of finite mixtures of normal regressions in which normal means and…
We revisit the convergence analysis of constant stepsize stochastic approximation (SA) with decision-dependent Markovian noise, with a focus on characterizing the stationary bias against the root of the mean-field equation. We first…
Recently, some works have suggested methods to combine variational probabilistic inference with Monte Carlo sampling. One promising approach is via local optimal transport. In this approach, a gradient steepest descent method based on local…
We establish upper bounds for the minimal number of hidden units for which a binary stochastic feedforward network with sigmoid activation probabilities and a single hidden layer is a universal approximator of Markov kernels. We show that…
The continuous random energy model (CREM) is a toy model of spin glasses on $\{0,1\}^N$ that, in the limit, exhibits an infinitely hierarchical correlation structure. We give two polynomial-time algorithms to approximately sample from the…
Nonlinear kernels can be approximated using finite-dimensional feature maps for efficient risk minimization. Due to the inherent trade-off between the dimension of the (mapped) feature space and the approximation accuracy, the key problem…
We consider the problem of inference in discrete probabilistic models, that is, distributions over subsets of a finite ground set. These encompass a range of well-known models in machine learning, such as determinantal point processes and…
A long-standing gap exists between the theoretical analysis of Markov chain Monte Carlo convergence, which is often based on statistical divergences, and the diagnostics used in practice. We introduce the first general convergence…
Bayesian inference in state-space models is challenging due to high-dimensional state trajectories. A viable approach is particle Markov chain Monte Carlo, combining MCMC and sequential Monte Carlo to form "exact approximations" to…