Related papers: An improved Markov-chain Monte Carlo sampler for t…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques are now widely used for cosmological parameter estimation. Chains are generated to sample the posterior probability distribution obtained following the Bayesian approach. An important issue is how…
We study the benefits and limits of parallelised Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling in cosmology. MCMC methods are widely used for the estimation of cosmological parameters from a given set of observations and are typically based on…
We present a Bayesian sampling algorithm called adaptive importance sampling or Population Monte Carlo (PMC), whose computational workload is easily parallelizable and thus has the potential to considerably reduce the wall-clock time…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampler is widely used for cosmological parameter estimation from CMB and other data. However, due to the intrinsic serial nature of the MCMC sampler, convergence is often very slow. Here we present a fast…
We present a fast Markov Chain Monte-Carlo exploration of cosmological parameter space. We perform a joint analysis of results from recent CMB experiments and provide parameter constraints, including sigma_8, from the CMB independent of…
We present a comprehensive comparison of different Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling methods, evaluating their performance on both standard test problems and cosmological parameter estimation. Our analysis includes traditional…
The Fisher matrix formalism has in recent times become the standard method for predicting the precision with which various cosmological parameters can be extracted from future data. This approach is fast, and generally returns accurate…
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…
The Planck satellite, along with several ground based telescopes, have mapped the cosmic microwave background (CMB) at sufficient resolution and signal-to-noise so as to allow a detection of the subtle distortions due to the gravitational…
Using Markov chain Monte Carlo to sample from posterior distributions was the key innovation which made Bayesian data analysis practical. Notoriously, however, MCMC is hard to tune, hard to diagnose, and hard to parallelize. This…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) provides a feasible method for inferring Hidden Markov models, however, it is often computationally prohibitive, especially constrained by the curse of dimensionality, as the Monte Carlo sampler traverses…
We propose an efficient Bayesian MCMC algorithm for estimating cosmological parameters from CMB data without use of likelihood approximations. It builds on a previously developed Gibbs sampling framework that allows for exploration of the…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods sample from unnormalized probability distributions and offer guarantees of exact sampling. However, in the continuous case, unfavorable geometry of the target distribution can greatly limit the…
We implement support for a cosmological parameter estimation algorithm as proposed by Racine et al. (2016) in Commander, and quantify its computational efficiency and cost. For a semi-realistic simulation similar to Planck LFI 70 GHz, we…
We develop a modular approach to Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling for unnormalized target densities. In this approach, Markov chains are constructed in parallel, each constrained to a subset of the target space. The Monte Carlo…
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…
Traditional Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods suffer from low acceptance rate, slow mixing and low efficiency in high dimensions. Hamiltonian Monte Carlo resolves this issue by avoiding the random walk. Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are routinely used to draw samples from distributions with intractable normalization constants. However, standard MCMC algorithms do not apply to doubly-intractable distributions in which there are…
Transit timing variations (TTVs) are a valuable tool to determine the masses and orbits of transiting planets in multi-planet systems. TTVs can be readily modeled given knowledge of the interacting planets' orbital configurations and…
The Planck experiment will soon provide a very accurate measurement of Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropies. This will let cosmologists determine most of the cosmological parameters with unprecedented accuracy. Future experiments will…