English

Multilevel Delayed Acceptance MCMC with an Adaptive Error Model in PyMC3

Computation 2020-12-11 v1

Abstract

Uncertainty Quantification through Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) can be prohibitively expensive for target probability densities with expensive likelihood functions, for instance when the evaluation it involves solving a Partial Differential Equation (PDE), as is the case in a wide range of engineering applications. Multilevel Delayed Acceptance (MLDA) with an Adaptive Error Model (AEM) is a novel approach, which alleviates this problem by exploiting a hierarchy of models, with increasing complexity and cost, and correcting the inexpensive models on-the-fly. The method has been integrated within the open-source probabilistic programming package PyMC3 and is available in the latest development version. In this paper, the algorithm is presented along with an illustrative example.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2012.05668,
  title  = {Multilevel Delayed Acceptance MCMC with an Adaptive Error Model in PyMC3},
  author = {Mikkel B. Lykkegaard and Grigorios Mingas and Robert Scheichl and Colin Fox and Tim J. Dodwell},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2012.05668},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

8 pages, 4 figures, accepted for Machine Learning for Engineering Modeling, Simulation, and Design Workshop at Neural Information Processing Systems 2020

R2 v1 2026-06-23T20:52:23.315Z