Related papers: "Go with the winners"-Simulations
Computing the similarity between two probability distributions is a recurring theme across control. We introduce a unified family of distances between the probability distributions of two random variables that is based on the discrepancy…
We give a cross-disciplinary survey on ``population'' Monte Carlo algorithms. In these algorithms, a set of ``walkers'' or ``particles'' is used as a representation of a high-dimensional vector. The computation is carried out by a random…
Coalescent theory combined with statistical modeling allows us to estimate effective population size fluctuations from molecular sequences of individuals sampled from a population of interest. When sequences are sampled serially through…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) has been progressively incorporated within the statistician's toolbox as an alternative sampling method in settings when standard Metropolis-Hastings is inefficient. HMC generates a Markov chain on an augmented…
In the present paper we deal with an optimal control problem related to a model in population dynamics; more precisely, the goal is to modify the behavior of a given density of individuals via another population of agents interacting with…
Gibbs sampling is a Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling technique that iteratively samples variables from their conditional distributions. There are two common scan orders for the variables: random scan and systematic scan. Due to the…
The probability distribution of the order parameter is exploited in order to obtain the criticality of magnetic systems. Monte Carlo simulations have been employed by using single spin flip Metropolis algorithm aided by finite-size scaling…
The self-learning Metropolis-Hastings algorithm is a powerful Monte Carlo method that, with the help of machine learning, adaptively generates an easy-to-sample probability distribution for approximating a given hard-to-sample distribution.…
We study a relaxation of the problem of coupling probability distributions -- a list of samples is generated from one distribution and an accept is declared if any one of these samples is identical to the sample generated from the other…
This work explores a novel perspective on solving nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization problems by leveraging sampling based methods. Instead of treating the objective function purely through traditional (often deterministic) optimization…
An energy efficient use of large scale sensor networks necessitates activating a subset of possible sensors for estimation at a fusion center. The problem is inherently combinatorial; to this end, a set of iterative, randomized algorithms…
In general, the statistical simulation approaches are referred to as the Monte Carlo methods as a whole. The broad class of the Monte Carlo methods involves the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques that attract the attention of…
Cloning, or approximate cloning, is one of basic operations in quantum information processing. In this paper, we deal with cloning of classical states, or probability distribution in asymptotic setting. We study the quality of the…
Adaptive importance sampling (AIS) methods are increasingly used for the approximation of distributions and related intractable integrals in the context of Bayesian inference. Population Monte Carlo (PMC) algorithms are a subclass of AIS…
This paper presents a control variate-based Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm for efficient sampling from the probability simplex, with a focus on applications in large-scale Bayesian models such as latent Dirichlet allocation. Standard…
Sampling from a lattice Gaussian distribution is emerging as an important problem in various areas such as coding and cryptography. The default sampling algorithm --- Klein's algorithm yields a distribution close to the lattice Gaussian…
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…
We consider continuous time Markovian processes where populations of individual agents interact stochastically according to kinetic rules. Despite the increasing prominence of such models in fields ranging from biology to smart cities,…
The note studies the problem of selecting a good enough subset out of a finite number of alternatives under a fixed simulation budget. Our work aims to maximize the posterior probability of correctly selecting a good subset. We formulate…
Gibbs sampling is a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method often used in Bayesian learning. MCMC methods can be difficult to deploy on parallel and distributed systems due to their inherently sequential nature. We study asynchronous Gibbs…