Related papers: Perfect Tempering
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are simple and extremely powerful techniques to sample from almost arbitrary distributions. The flaw in practice is that it can take a large and/or unknown amount of time to converge to the…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods require a large number of samples to approximate a posterior distribution, which can be costly when the likelihood or prior is expensive to evaluate. The number of samples can be reduced if we can…
We argue that one can associate a pseudo-time with sequences of configurations generated in the course of classical Monte Carlo simulations for a single-minimum bound state, if the sampling is optimal. Hereby the sampling rates can be,…
Informed Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have been proposed as scalable solutions to Bayesian posterior computation on high-dimensional discrete state spaces, but theoretical results about their convergence behavior in general…
Many applications in the field of statistics require Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. Determining appropriate starting values and run lengths can be both analytically and empirically challenging. A desire to overcome these problems has led…
A simple algorithm is described to sample permutations of identical particles in Path Integral Monte Carlo (PIMC) simulations of continuum many-body systems. The sampling strategy illustrated here is fairly general, and can be easily…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a powerful tool for sampling from complex probability distributions. Despite its versatility, MCMC often suffers from strong autocorrelation and the negative sign problem, leading to slowing down the…
We introduce an algorithm to systematically improve the efficiency of parallel tempering Monte Carlo simulations by optimizing the simulated temperature set. Our approach is closely related to a recently introduced adaptive algorithm that…
The Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm is a widely recognised as an efficient method for sampling a specified posterior distribution. However, when the posterior is multi-modal, conventional MCMC algorithms either tend to become…
Recent advances on overfitting Bayesian mixture models provide a solid and straightforward approach for inferring the underlying number of clusters and model parameters in heterogeneous datasets. The applicability of such a framework in…
A variant of the parallel tempering method is proposed in terms of a stochastic switching process for the coupled dynamics of replica configuration and temperature permutation. This formulation is shown to facilitate the analysis of the…
There has been substantial interest in developing Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms based on piecewise-deterministic Markov processes. However existing algorithms can only be used if the target distribution of interest is differentiable…
Exact approximations of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are a general emerging class of sampling algorithms. One of the main ideas behind exact approximations consists of replacing intractable quantities required to run standard…
Recent years have seen a rise in the application of machine learning techniques to aid the simulation of hard-to-sample systems that cannot be studied using traditional methods. Despite the introduction of many different architectures and…
A key task in Bayesian machine learning is sampling from distributions that are only specified up to a partition function (i.e., constant of proportionality). One prevalent example of this is sampling posteriors in parametric distributions,…
Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling methods often suffer from long correlation times. Consequently, these methods must be run for many steps to generate an independent sample. In this paper a method is proposed to overcome this difficulty.…
Models of biological systems often have many unknown parameters that must be determined in order for model behavior to match experimental observations. Commonly-used methods for parameter estimation that return point estimates of the…
Parameters in climate models are usually calibrated manually, exploiting only small subsets of the available data. This precludes both optimal calibration and quantification of uncertainties. Traditional Bayesian calibration methods that…
Bayesian inference for factorial hidden Markov models is challenging due to the exponentially sized latent variable space. Standard Monte Carlo samplers can have difficulties effectively exploring the posterior landscape and are often…
We show that efficient approximate sampling algorithms, combined with a slow exponential time oracle for computing its output distribution, can be combined into constructing efficient perfect samplers, which sample exactly from a target…