Related papers: Modular Markov chain Monte Carlo with application …
Efficient sampling of many-dimensional and multimodal density functions is a task of great interest in many research fields. We describe an algorithm that allows parallelizing inherently serial Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling by…
Probabilistic models are conceptually powerful tools for finding structure in data, but their practical effectiveness is often limited by our ability to perform inference in them. Exact inference is frequently intractable, so approximate…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a powerful Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method for performing approximate inference in complex probabilistic models of continuous variables. In common with many MCMC methods, however, the standard HMC…
As it has become common to use many computer cores in routine applications, finding good ways to parallelize popular algorithms has become increasingly important. In this paper, we present a parallelization scheme for Markov chain Monte…
This paper considers a new approach to using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) in contexts where one may adopt multilevel (ML) Monte Carlo. The underlying problem is to approximate expectations w.r.t. an underlying probability measure that is…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are essential tools in computational statistics for sampling from unnormalised probability distributions, but can be fragile when targeting high-dimensional, multimodal, or complex target…
In the context of Bayesian inversion for scientific and engineering modeling, Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling strategies are the benchmark due to their flexibility and robustness in dealing with arbitrary posterior probability density…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a powerful methodology for the approximation of posterior distributions. However, the iterative nature of MCMC does not naturally facilitate its use with modern highly parallel computation on HPC and cloud…
We introduce a new Markov-Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach designed for efficient sampling of highly correlated and multimodal posteriors. Parallel tempering, though effective, is a costly technique for sampling such posteriors. Our…
We present a general framework for accelerating a large class of widely used Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. Our approach exploits fast, iterative approximations to the target density to speculatively evaluate many potential…
Sampling from posterior distributions using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods can require an exhaustive number of iterations, particularly when the posterior is multi-modal as the MCMC sampler can become trapped in a local mode for a…
We develop a novel Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method that exploits a hierarchy of models of increasing complexity to efficiently generate samples from an unnormalized target distribution. Broadly, the method rewrites the Multilevel…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms provide a very general recipe for estimating properties of complicated distributions. While their use has become commonplace and there is a large literature on MCMC theory and practice, MCMC users…
Parallel tempering is a meta-algorithm for Markov Chain Monte Carlo that uses multiple chains to sample from tempered versions of the target distribution, enhancing mixing in multi-modal distributions that are challenging for traditional…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is widely used for sampling from high dimensional target distributions with densities known up to proportionality. While HMC exhibits favorable scaling properties in high dimensions, it struggles with strongly…
We propose a sequential Markov chain Monte Carlo (SMCMC) algorithm to sample from a sequence of probability distributions, corresponding to posterior distributions at different times in on-line applications. SMCMC proceeds as in usual MCMC…
Auxiliary variable methods such as the Parallel Tempering and the cluster Monte Carlo methods generate samples that follow a target distribution by using proposal and auxiliary distributions. In sampling from complex distributions, these…
In sampling tasks, it is common for target distributions to be known up to a normalizing constant. However, in many situations, even evaluating the unnormalized distribution can be costly or infeasible. This issue arises in scenarios such…
Markov chain Monte Carlo is an inherently serial algorithm. Although likelihood calculations for individual steps can sometimes be parallelized, the serial evolution of the process is widely viewed as incompatible with parallelization,…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are widely used in machine learning. One of the major problems with MCMC is the question of how to design chains that mix fast over the whole state space; in particular, how to select the parameters…