Related papers: On the ergodicity properties of some adaptive MCMC…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, such as the Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithm, are widely used for Bayesian inference. One of the most important issues for any MCMC method is the convergence of the Markov chain, which depends…
This article studies the convergence properties of trans-dimensional MCMC algorithms when the total number of models is finite. It is shown that, for reversible and some non-reversible trans-dimensional Markov chains, under mild conditions,…
In this paper, we study the asymptotic variance of sample path averages for inhomogeneous Markov chains that evolve alternatingly according to two different $\pi$-reversible Markov transition kernels $P$ and $Q$. More specifically, our main…
We prove explicit, i.e. non-asymptotic, error bounds for Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. The problem is to compute the expectation of a function f with respect to a measure {\pi}. Different convergence properties of Markov chains imply…
Despite the enormous success of Hamiltonian Monte Carlo and related Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, sampling often still represents the computational bottleneck in scientific applications. Availability of parallel resources can…
I show how one can modify the random-walk Metropolis MCMC method in such a way that a sequence of modified Metropolis updates takes little computation time when the rejection rate is outside a desired interval. This allows one to…
Elliptical slice sampling is a widely used gradient-free Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm that is tuning-free and capable of adapting to local characteristics of the target distribution. However, its primary limitation is that sampling…
A simple and efficient adaptive Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method, called the Metropolized Adaptive Subspace (MAdaSub) algorithm, is proposed for sampling from high-dimensional posterior model distributions in Bayesian variable…
We make two closely related theoretical contributions to the use of importance sampling schemes. First, for independent sampling, we prove that the minimax optimal trial distribution coincides with the target if and only if the target…
Metropolis-Hastings (MH) is a foundational Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm. In this paper, we ask whether it is possible to formulate and analyse MH in terms of categorical probability, using a recent involutive framework for…
We connect known results about diffusion limits of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms to the Computer Science notion of algorithm complexity. Our main result states that any diffusion limit of a Markov process implies a…
We consider versions of the Metropolis algorithm which avoid the inefficiency of rejections. We first illustrate that a natural Uniform Selection Algorithm might not converge to the correct distribution. We then analyse the use of Markov…
Couplings play a central role in the analysis of Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms and appear increasingly often in the algorithms themselves, e.g. in convergence diagnostics, parallelization, and variance reduction techniques. Existing…
Monte Carlo simulations of systems of particles such as hard spheres or soft spheres with singular kernels can display around a phase transition prohibitively long convergence times when using traditional Hasting-Metropolis reversible…
In this paper we study Markov chains associated with the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm. We consider conditions under which the sequence of the successive densities of such a chain converges to the target density according to the total…
Global fits of physics models require efficient methods for exploring high-dimensional and/or multimodal posterior functions. We introduce a novel method for accelerating Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling by pairing a…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are powerful computational tools for analysis of complex statistical problems. However, their computational efficiency is highly dependent on the chosen proposal distribution, which is generally…
We propose a weighting scheme for the proposals within Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms and show how this can improve statistical efficiency at no extra computational cost. These methods are most powerful when combined with…
This paper discusses the irreducibility and geometric ergodicity of the Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) algorithm. We consider cases where the number of steps of the symplectic integrator is either fixed or random. Under mild conditions on…
We propose an adaptive independent Metropolis--Hastings algorithm with the ability to learn from all previous proposals in the chain except the current location. It is an extension of the independent Metropolis--Hastings algorithm.…