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Interest is in evaluating, by Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation, the expected value of a function with respect to a, possibly unnormalized, probability distribution. A general purpose variance reduction technique for the MCMC…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods asymptotically sample from complex probability distributions. The pseudo-marginal MCMC framework only requires an unbiased estimator of the unnormalized probability distribution function to construct…
Markov chains are convenient means of generating realizations of networks with a given (joint or otherwise) degree distribution, since they simply require a procedure for rewiring edges. The major challenge is to find the right number of…
Performing numerical integration when the integrand itself cannot be evaluated point-wise is a challenging task that arises in statistical analysis, notably in Bayesian inference for models with intractable likelihood functions. Markov…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods to sample from a probability distribution $\pi$ defined on a space $(\Theta,\mathcal{T})$ consist of the simulation of realisations of Markov chains $\{\theta_{n},n\geq1\}$ of invariant distribution…
We consider the efficient use of an approximation within Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), with subsequent importance sampling (IS) correction of the Markov chain inexact output, leading to asymptotically exact inference. We detail…
Monte Carlo (MC) sampling methods are widely applied in Bayesian inference, system simulation and optimization problems. The Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are a well-known class of MC methods which generate a Markov chain with…
The naive importance sampling estimator, based on samples from a single importance density, can be numerically unstable. Instead, we consider generalized importance sampling estimators where samples from more than one probability…
Markov chains are fundamental models for stochastic dynamics, with applications in a wide range of areas such as population dynamics, queueing systems, reinforcement learning, and Monte Carlo methods. Estimating the transition matrix and…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods for sampling probability density functions (combined with abundant computational resources) have transformed the sciences, especially in performing probabilistic inferences, or fitting models to data.…
Use each of n exact samples as the initial state for a MCMC sampler run for m steps. We give confidence intervals for accuracy of estimators which are always valid and which, in certain settings, are almost as good as the intervals one…
In Bayesian inference, predictive distributions are typically in the form of samples generated via Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) or related algorithms. In this paper, we conduct a systematic analysis of how to make and evaluate…
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…
The literature in social network analysis has largely focused on methods and models which require complete network data; however there exist many networks which can only be studied via sampling methods due to the scale or complexity of the…
This paper addresses the key challenge of estimating the asymptotic covariance associated with the Markov chain central limit theorem, which is essential for visualizing and terminating Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulations. We focus…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have become a cornerstone of many modern scientific analyses by providing a straightforward approach to numerically estimate uncertainties in the parameters of a model using a sequence of random…
The efficiency of a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm might be measured by the cost of generating one independent sample, or equivalently, the total cost divided by the effective sample size, defined in terms of the integrated…
A common tool in the practice of Markov Chain Monte Carlo is to use approximating transition kernels to speed up computation when the desired kernel is slow to evaluate or intractable. A limited set of quantitative tools exist to assess the…
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 elaborate the idea behind Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods in a mathematically coherent, yet simple and understandable way. To this end, we proof a pivotal convergence theorem for finite Markov chains and a minimal version of the…