Related papers: Slice Sampling

Slice sampling is a well-established Markov chain Monte Carlo method for (approximate) sampling of target distributions which are only known up to a normalizing constant. The method is based on choosing a new state on a slice, i.e., a…

Slice sampling is an efficient Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm to sample from an unnormalized density with acceptance ratio always $1$. However, when the variable to sample is unbounded, its "stepping-out" heuristic works only locally,…

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…

The shrinking rank method is a variation of slice sampling that is efficient at sampling from multivariate distributions with highly correlated parameters. It requires that the gradient of the log-density be computable. At each individual…

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…

Polar slice sampling (Roberts & Rosenthal, 2002) is a Markov chain approach for approximate sampling of distributions that is difficult, if not impossible, to implement efficiently, but behaves provably well with respect to the dimension.…

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…

Different Markov chains can be used for approximate sampling of a distribution given by an unnormalized density function with respect to the Lebesgue measure. The hit-and-run, (hybrid) slice sampler and random walk Metropolis algorithm are…

Slice Sampling has emerged as a powerful Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm that adapts to the characteristics of the target distribution with minimal hand-tuning. However, Slice Sampling's performance is highly sensitive to the…

We describe two slice sampling methods for taking multivariate steps using the crumb framework. These methods use the gradients at rejected proposals to adapt to the local curvature of the log-density surface, a technique that can produce…

In this paper we introduce a new sampling algorithm which has the potential to be adopted as a universal replacement to the Metropolis--Hastings algorithm. It is related to the slice sampler, and motivated by an algorithm which is…

Gibbs sampling is one of the most commonly used Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms due to its simplicity and efficiency. It cycles through the latent variables, sampling each one from its distribution conditional on the current…

It is known that the simple slice sampler has robust convergence properties, however the class of problems where it can be implemented is limited. In contrast, we consider hybrid slice samplers which are easily implementable and where…

Probability measures on the sphere form an important class of statistical models and are used, for example, in modeling directional data or shapes. Due to their widespread use, but also as an algorithmic building block, efficient sampling…

Many probabilistic models introduce strong dependencies between variables using a latent multivariate Gaussian distribution or a Gaussian process. We present a new Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm for performing inference in models with…

I show how Markov chain sampling with the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm can be modified so as to take bigger steps when the distribution being sampled from has the characteristic that its density can be quickly recomputed for a new point if…

Probabilistic models are conceptually powerful tools for finding structure in data, but their practical effectiveness is often limited by our ability to perform inference in them. Exact inference is frequently intractable, so approximate…

Traditional Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling methods often struggle with sharp curvatures, intricate geometries, and multimodal distributions. Slice sampling can resolve local exploration inefficiency issues, and Riemannian geometries help…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are widely used in machine learning. One of the major problems with MCMC is the question of how to design chains that mix fast over the whole state space; in particular, how to select the parameters…

For Bayesian learning, given likelihood function and Gaussian prior, the elliptical slice sampler, introduced by Murray, Adams and MacKay 2010, provides a tool for the construction of a Markov chain for approximate sampling of the…