Related papers: "Go with the winners"-Simulations
Gibbs sampling is one of the most popular Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms because of its simplicity, scalability, and wide applicability within many fields of statistics, science, and engineering. In the labeled random finite sets…
This paper studies the sample complexity of searching over multiple populations. We consider a large number of populations, each corresponding to either distribution P0 or P1. The goal of the search problem studied here is to find one…
We are interested in modelling Darwinian evolution, resulting from the interplay of phenotypic variation and natural selection through ecological interactions. Our models are rooted in the microscopic, stochastic description of a population…
In this paper, we consider a population of individuals who have actions and opinions, which coevolve, mutually influencing one another on a complex network structure. In particular, we formulate a control problem for this social network, in…
Recent years witnessed the development of powerful generative models based on flows, diffusion or autoregressive neural networks, achieving remarkable success in generating data from examples with applications in a broad range of areas. A…
Generative models, like flows and diffusions, have recently emerged as popular and efficacious policy parameterizations in robotics. There has been much speculation as to the factors underlying their successes, ranging from capturing…
Gibbs states (i.e., thermal states) can be used for several applications such as quantum simulation, quantum machine learning, quantum optimization, and the study of open quantum systems. Moreover, semi-definite programming, combinatorial…
Algorithms for exact and approximate inference in stochastic logic programs (SLPs) are presented, based respectively, on variable elimination and importance sampling. We then show how SLPs can be used to represent prior distributions for…
Metropolis Hastings nested sampling evolves a Markov chain, accepting new points along the chain according to a version of the Metropolis Hastings acceptance ratio, which has been modified to satisfy the nested sampling likelihood…
Component-wise MCMC algorithms, including Gibbs and conditional Metropolis-Hastings samplers, are commonly used for sampling from multivariate probability distributions. A long-standing question regarding Gibbs algorithms is whether a…
Multiple-try Metropolis (MTM) is a popular Markov chain Monte Carlo method with the appealing feature of being amenable to parallel computing. At each iteration, it samples several candidates for the next state of the Markov chain and…
The Metropolis-Hastings algorithm is a fundamental Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method for sampling and inference. With the advent of Big Data, distributed and parallel variants of MCMC methods are attracting increased attention. In this…
We introduce a novel approach based on stochastic optimization to find the optimal sampling distribution for the data-driven stability analysis of switched linear systems. Our goal is to address limitations of existing approaches, in…
One of the most demanding calculations is to generate random samples from a specified probability distribution (usually with an unknown normalizing prefactor) in a high-dimensional configuration space. One often has to resort to using a…
Controlling the stochastic dynamics of biological populations is a challenge that arises across various biological contexts. However, these dynamics are inherently nonlinear and involve a discrete state space, i.e., the number of molecules,…
Generating random variates from high-dimensional distributions is often done approximately using Markov chain Monte Carlo. In certain cases, perfect simulation algorithms exist that allow one to draw exactly from the stationary…
We consider a simple approach to solving assortment optimization under the random utility maximization model. The approach uses Monte-Carlo simulation to construct a ranking-based choice model that serves as a proxy for the true choice…
We consider a simulation optimization problem for a context-dependent decision-making. A Gaussian mixture model is proposed to capture the performance clustering phenomena of context-dependent designs. Under a Bayesian framework, we develop…
We propose parameter optimization techniques for weighted ensemble sampling of Markov chains in the steady-state regime. Weighted ensemble consists of replicas of a Markov chain, each carrying a weight, that are periodically resampled…
We consider the problem of controlling a Markov decision process (MDP) with a large state space, so as to minimize average cost. Since it is intractable to compete with the optimal policy for large scale problems, we pursue the more modest…