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There are well established reductions between combinatorial sampling and counting problems (Jerrum, Valiant, Vazirani TCS 1986). Building off of a very recent parallel algorithm utilizing this connection (Liu, Yin, Zhang arxiv 2024), we…
Full Bayesian computational inference for model determination in undirected graphical models is currently restricted to decomposable graphs, except for problems of very small scale. In this paper we develop new, more efficient methodology…
We describe a general strategy for sampling configurations from a given distribution, NOT based on the standard Metropolis (Markov chain) strategy. It uses the fact that nontrivial problems in statistical physics are high dimensional and…
Achieving robust uncertainty quantification for deep neural networks represents an important requirement in many real-world applications of deep learning such as medical imaging where it is necessary to assess the reliability of a neural…
Variable selection is a key issue when analyzing high-dimensional data. The explosion of data with large sample sizes and dimensionality brings new challenges to this problem in both inference accuracy and computational complexity. To…
In this work, we present, analyze, and implement a class of Multi-Level Markov chain Monte Carlo (ML-MCMC) algorithms based on independent Metropolis-Hastings proposals for Bayesian inverse problems. In this context, the likelihood function…
We here consider the subset simulation method which approaches a failure event using a decreasing sequence of nested intermediate failure events. The method resembles importance sampling, which actively explores a probability space by…
Gibbs sampling is a widely used Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method for numerically approximating integrals of interest in Bayesian statistics and other mathematical sciences. Many implementations of MCMC methods do not extend easily to…
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…
Gibbs sampling on factor graphs is a widely used inference technique, which often produces good empirical results. Theoretical guarantees for its performance are weak: even for tree structured graphs, the mixing time of Gibbs may be…
We establish tight results for rapid mixing of Gibbs samplers for the Ferromagnetic Ising model on general graphs. We show that if \[(d-1)\tanh\beta<1,\] then there exists a constant C such that the discrete time mixing time of Gibbs…
Motivated by the problem of exploring discrete but very complex state spaces in Bayesian models, we propose a novel Markov Chain Monte Carlo search algorithm: the taxicab sampler. We describe the construction of this sampler and discuss how…
Dawid, Kjaerulff and Lauritzen (1994) provided a preliminary description of a hybrid between Monte-Carlo sampling methods and exact local computations in junction trees. Utilizing the strengths of both methods, such hybrid inference methods…
Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms are used to simulate from complex statistical distributions by way of a local exploration of these distributions. This local feature avoids heavy requests on understanding the nature of the target, but it…
We show that evolutionary computation can be implemented as standard Markov-chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC) sampling. With some care, `genetic algorithms' can be constructed that are reversible Markov chains that satisfy detailed balance; it…
Elliptical slice sampling, when adapted to linearly truncated multivariate normal distributions, is a rejection-free Markov chain Monte Carlo method. At its core, it requires analytically constructing an ellipse-polytope intersection. The…
We consider adaptive increasingly rare Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms, which are adaptive MCMC methods, where the adaptation concerning the "past'' happens less and less frequently over time. Under a contraction assumption with…
We consider posterior sampling in the very common Bayesian hierarchical model in which observed data depends on high-dimensional latent variables that, in turn, depend on relatively few hyperparameters. When the full conditional over the…
Consider a set of $n$ vertices, where each vertex has a location in $\mathbb{R}^d$ that is sampled uniformly from the unit cube in $\mathbb{R}^d$, and a weight associated to it. Construct a random graph by placing edges independently for…
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)…