Related papers: Perfect Tempering
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) samples efficiently from high-dimensional posterior distributions with proposed parameter draws obtained by iterating on a discretized version of the Hamiltonian dynamics. The iterations make HMC…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are frequently used to perform inference under a Bayesian modeling framework. Convergence diagnostics, such as traceplots, the Gelman-Rubin potential scale reduction factor, and effective sample…
We report a novel Monte Carlo scheme that greatly enhances the power of parallel-tempering simulations. In this method, we boost the accumulation of statistical averages by including information about all potential parallel tempering trial…
Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) samplers are powerful tools for Bayesian inference but suffer from high computational costs due to their reliance on large particle ensembles for accurate estimates. We introduce persistent sampling (PS), an…
The Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) sampling algorithm exploits Hamiltonian dynamics to construct efficient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), which has become increasingly popular in machine learning and statistics. Since HMC uses the gradient…
Direct simulation of biomolecular dynamics in thermal equilibrium is challenging due to the metastable nature of conformation dynamics and the computational cost of molecular dynamics. Biased or enhanced sampling methods may improve the…
Antithetic coupling is a general stratification strategy for reducing Monte Carlo variance without increasing the simulation size. The use of the antithetic principle in the Monte Carlo literature typically employs two strata via antithetic…
A key task in Bayesian statistics is sampling from distributions that are only specified up to a partition function (i.e., constant of proportionality). However, without any assumptions, sampling (even approximately) can be #P-hard, and few…
We investigate the increase in efficiency of simulated and parallel tempering MCMC algorithms when using non-reversible updates to give them "momentum". By making a connection to a certain simple discrete Markov chain, we show that, under…
Performing numerical integration when the integrand itself cannot be evaluated point-wise is a challenging task that arises in statistical analysis, notably in Bayesian inference for models with intractable likelihood functions. Markov…
Bayesian inference in deep neural networks is challenging due to the high-dimensional, strongly multi-modal parameter posterior density landscape. Markov chain Monte Carlo approaches asymptotically recover the true posterior but are…
This simple note lays out a few observations which are well known in many ways but may not have been said in quite this way before. The basic idea is that when comparing two different Markov chains it is useful to couple them is such a way…
Model comparison for the purposes of selection, averaging and validation is a problem found throughout statistics. Within the Bayesian paradigm, these problems all require the calculation of the posterior probabilities of models within a…
Communication costs, resulting from synchronization requirements during learning, can greatly slow down many parallel machine learning algorithms. In this paper, we present a parallel Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm in which…
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…
For quantum field theories with topological sectors, Monte Carlo simulations on fine lattices tend to be obstructed by an extremely long auto-correlation time with respect to the topological charge. Then reliable numerical measurements are…
We present a new Monte Carlo algorithm that allows the simultaneous determination of a few extremal eigenpairs of a very large matrix. It extends the power method and uses a new sampling method, the sewing method, that does a large state…
The identification of parameters in mathematical models using noisy observations is a common task in uncertainty quantification. We employ the framework of Bayesian inversion: we combine monitoring and observational data with prior…
While gradient-based discrete samplers are effective in sampling from complex distributions, they are susceptible to getting trapped in local minima, particularly in high-dimensional, multimodal discrete distributions, owing to the…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are a powerful tool for computation with complex probability distributions. However the performance of such methods is critically dependant on properly tuned parameters, most of which are difficult if…