Related papers: On the ergodicity properties of some adaptive MCMC…

We demonstrate the use of a variational method to determine a quantitative lower bound on the rate of convergence of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms as a function of the target density and proposal density. The bound relies on…

The exchange algorithm is one of the most popular extensions of the Metropolis--Hastings algorithm to sample from doubly-intractable distributions. However, the theoretical exploration of the exchange algorithm is very limited. For example,…

The Metropolis algorithm is one of the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods that realize sampling from the target probability distribution. In this paper, we are concerned with the sampling from the distribution in non-identifiable cases…

Parallel tempering is a generic Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling method which allows good mixing with multimodal target distributions, where conventional Metropolis-Hastings algorithms often fail. The mixing properties of the sampler…

Practitioners of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) may hesitate to use random walk Metropolis-Hastings algorithms, especially variable-at-a-time algorithms with many parameters, because these algorithms require users to select values of…

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a powerful Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm for estimating expectations with respect to continuous un-normalized probability distributions. MCMC estimators typically have higher variance than…

Accept-reject based Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are the workhorse algorithm for Bayesian inference. These algorithms, like Metropolis-Hastings, require choosing a proposal distribution which is typically informed by the desired…

High-dimensional distributions, especially those with heavy tails, are notoriously difficult for off-the-shelf MCMC samplers: the combination of unbounded state spaces, diminishing gradient information, and local moves results in…

The Monte Carlo within Metropolis (MCwM) algorithm, interpreted as a perturbed Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithm, provides an approach for approximate sampling when the target distribution is intractable. Assuming the unperturbed Markov…

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a state-of-the-art Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling algorithm for drawing samples from smooth probability densities over continuous spaces. We study the variant most widely used in practice, Metropolized…

We consider whether ergodic Markov chains with bounded step size remain bounded in probability when their transitions are modified by an adversary on a bounded subset. We provide counterexamples to show that the answer is no in general, and…

The problem of optimally scaling the proposal distribution in a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm is critical to the quality of the generated samples. Much work has gone into obtaining such results for various Metropolis-Hastings (MH)…

We propose a new sampling algorithm combining two quite powerful ideas in the Markov chain Monte Carlo literature -- adaptive Metropolis sampler and two-stage Metropolis-Hastings sampler. The proposed sampling method will be particularly…

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…

A Kernel Adaptive Metropolis-Hastings algorithm is introduced, for the purpose of sampling from a target distribution with strongly nonlinear support. The algorithm embeds the trajectory of the Markov chain into a reproducing kernel Hilbert…

When targeting a distribution that is artificially invariant under some permutations, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms face the label-switching problem, rendering marginal inference particularly cumbersome. Such a situation…

Many problems in the physical sciences, machine learning, and statistical inference necessitate sampling from a high-dimensional, multi-modal probability distribution. Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms, the ubiquitous tool for this…

Estimation in the deformable template model is a big challenge in image analysis. The issue is to estimate an atlas of a population. This atlas contains a template and the corresponding geometrical variability of the observed shapes. The…

It has become increasingly easy nowadays to collect approximate posterior samples via fast algorithms such as variational Bayes, but concerns exist about the estimation accuracy. It is tempting to build solutions that exploit approximate…

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a widely used sampler for continuous probability distributions. In many cases, the underlying Hamiltonian dynamics exhibit a phenomenon of resonance which decreases the efficiency of the algorithm and makes…