Related papers: "Go with the winners"-Simulations
Among random sampling methods, Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms are foremost. Using a combination of analytical and numerical approaches, we study their convergence properties towards the steady state, within a random walk Metropolis…
Under a Bayesian framework, we formulate the fully sequential sampling and selection decision in statistical ranking and selection as a stochastic control problem, and derive the associated Bellman equation. Using value function…
The ability to manipulate and control fluid flows is of great importance in many scientific and engineering applications. Here, a cluster-based control framework is proposed to determine optimal control laws with respect to a cost function…
In this paper, we address a social planner's optimal control problem for a partially observable stochastic epidemic model. The control measures include social distancing, testing, and vaccination. Using a diffusion approximation for the…
The particle Gibbs sampler is a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm to sample from the full posterior distribution of a state-space model. It does so by executing Gibbs sampling steps on an extended target distribution defined on the…
We present a method for sampling microscopic configurations of a physical system distributed according to a canonical (Boltzmann-Gibbs) measure, with a constraint holding in average. Assuming that the constraint can be controlled by the…
We show that evolutionary computation can be implemented as standard Markov-chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC) sampling. With some care, `genetic algorithms' can be constructed that are reversible Markov chains that satisfy detailed balance; it…
Markov chain Monte Carlo is a class of algorithms for drawing Markovian samples from high-dimensional target densities to approximate the numerical integration associated with computing statistical expectation, especially in Bayesian…
We present an intuitive, conceptual, but semi-rigorous introduction to the celebrated Markov Chain Monte Carlo method using a simple model of population dynamics as our motivation and focusing on a few elementary distributions.…
This paper addresses the problem of Monte Carlo approximation of posterior probability distributions. In particular, we have considered a recently proposed technique known as population Monte Carlo (PMC), which is based on an iterative…
Diffusions are a successful technique to sample from high-dimensional distributions. The target distribution can be either explicitly given or learnt from a collection of samples. They implement a diffusion process whose endpoint is a…
In the last decade, sequential Monte-Carlo methods (SMC) emerged as a key tool in computational statistics. These algorithms approximate a sequence of distributions by a sequence of weighted empirical measures associated to a weighted…
Conventional Monte Carlo simulations are stochastic in the sense that the acceptance of a trial move is decided by comparing a computed acceptance probability with a random number, uniformly distributed between 0 and 1. Here we consider the…
The aim of this paper is twofold. First, three theoretical principles are formalized: randomization, overrepresentation and restriction. We develop these principles and give a rationale for their use in choosing the sampling design in a…
Traditional methods for unsupervised learning of finite mixture models require to evaluate the likelihood of all components of the mixture. This becomes computationally prohibitive when the number of components is large, as it is, for…
Stochastic optimization problems often involve data distributions that change in reaction to the decision variables. This is the case for example when members of the population respond to a deployed classifier by manipulating their features…
An instance of a random constraint satisfaction problem defines a random subset S (the set of solutions) of a large product space (the set of assignments). We consider two prototypical problem ensembles (random k-satisfiability and…
The Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithm is the prototype for a class of Markov chain Monte Carlo methods that propose transitions between states and then accept or reject the proposal. These methods generate a correlated sequence of random…
A defining feature of sampling-based motion planning is the reliance on an implicit representation of the state space, which is enabled by a set of probing samples. Traditionally, these samples are drawn either probabilistically or…
In this paper, we consider robust control using randomized algorithms. We extend the existing order statistics distribution theory to the general case in which the distribution of population is not assumed to be continuous and the order…