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arXiv research

A locally-built, LLM-digested index of recent arXiv papers in quant finance, geometry/topology, and statistical ML — keyword search served straight from SQLite on this machine.

168,695 papers · 148 categories

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591418 · Feb 202019922001200920172026
48 results for Birth-Death MCMC

Decision trees are flexible models that are well suited for many statistical regression problems. In a Bayesian framework for regression trees, Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) search algorithms are required to generate samples of tree models according to their posterior probabilities. The critical component of such an …

2019-04-19abs ↗pdf ↗

Paper proposes scalable method for analyzing multi-omic data.

problem Integrating high-dimensional multi-omic data for cancer subtyping.
method Mixed graphical model approach using Birth-Death MCMC algorithm.
result Our method outperforms LASSO and standard BDMCMC in computational efficiency and model selection accuracy.

Study birth-death dynamics for sampling Gibbs measures with nonconvex potentials.

problem Sampling Gibbs measures with nonconvex potentials.
method Birth-death dynamics, Kullback-Leibler divergence, χ2χ^2 divergence, kernel-based approximations, ΓΓ-convergence of gradient flows.
result Probability density converges exponentially fast to Gibbs equilibrium measure with a universal rate.

We consider models of the population or opinion dynamics which result in the non-linear stochastic differential equations (SDEs) exhibiting the spurious long-range memory. In this context, the correspondence between the description of the birth-death processes as the continuous-time Markov chains and the continuous SDE…

2019-04-30abs ↗pdf ↗

A fundamental problem in Bayesian inference and statistical machine learning is to efficiently sample from multimodal distributions. Due to metastability, multimodal distributions are difficult to sample using standard Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. We propose a new sampling algorithm based on a birth-death mechanis…

2019-05-23abs ↗pdf ↗

New method uses birth-death process and exploration component to accelerate sampling from multimodal distributions.

problem Sampling from multimodal probability distributions efficiently.
method Combines birth-death process and exploration component to accelerate sampling.
result Proves exponential asymptotic convergence under mild assumptions.

Bayesian method learns graph structures from Gaussian data efficiently.

problem Scalability issue in Bayesian Gaussian graphical model inference.
method Marginal pseudo-likelihood, birth-death and reversible jump MCMC algorithms.
result Efficient graph structure learning for large graphs with over 1,000 nodes.

Near a birth-death critical point in a one-parameter family of gradient flows, there are precisely two Morse critical points of index difference one on the birth side. This paper gives a self-contained proof of the folklore theorem that these two critical points are joined by a unique gradient trajectory up to time-shi…

2017-06-23abs ↗pdf ↗

FS&P uses birth-death process to ensure global convergence of stochastic conic particle gradient descent.

problem Global optimization of non-convex objective functions over measure space.
method Introduces Fast Spawn\&Prune (FS\&P) combining CPGD with birth-death process.
result First theoretical guarantee of global convergence for discrete-time stochastic algorithms.

Neural networks with a large number of parameters admit a mean-field description, which has recently served as a theoretical explanation for the favorable training properties of "overparameterized" models. In this regime, gradient descent obeys a deterministic partial differential equation (PDE) that converges to a glo…

2019-02-05abs ↗pdf ↗

In this paper, we study curvature dimension conditions on birth-death processes which correspond to linear graphs, i.e., weighted graphs supported on the infinite line or the half line. We give a combinatorial characterization of Bakry and Émery's CD(K,n)CD(K,n) condition for linear graphs and prove the triviality of edge w…

2017-12-05abs ↗pdf ↗

Flow Matching for count data improves sample quality and efficiency.

problem Mapping between count distributions across batches or time points in high-dimensional count data.
method count-FM, a flow-matching framework based on a continuous-time birth-death process with local unit jumps.
result count-FM achieves better sample quality than representative baselines while using fewer parameters.

The rapid development of computing power and efficient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation algorithms have revolutionized Bayesian statistics, making it a highly practical inference method in applied work. However, MCMC algorithms tend to be computationally demanding, and are particularly slow for large datasets…

2018-07-23abs ↗pdf ↗

New RL algorithm reduces regret in birth-death queueing problems.

problem Efficiency of reinforcement learning in MDPs with large state spaces.
method Modified Ucrl2 algorithm exploiting birth-death structure.
result Regret bound of ildeO(E2AT) ilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{E_2AT}) independent of state space size.

It is known that the Langevin dynamics used in MCMC is the gradient flow of the KL divergence on the Wasserstein space, which helps convergence analysis and inspires recent particle-based variational inference methods (ParVIs). But no more MCMC dynamics is understood in this way. In this work, by developing novel conce…

2019-02-01abs ↗pdf ↗

Monte Carlo (MC) methods are widely used for Bayesian inference and optimization in statistics, signal processing and machine learning. A well-known class of MC methods are Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. In order to foster better exploration of the state space, specially in high-dimensional applications, s…

2015-07-30abs ↗pdf ↗

Cyclical MCMC tackles high-dimensional multimodal distributions, showing convergence under certain conditions.

problem High-dimensional multimodal posterior distributions in deep learning.
method Cyclical MCMC framework that tracks tempered versions of the target distribution over time.
result Cyclical MCMC converges to the target distribution under fast mixing kernels but fails in slow mixing cases.

The paper develops a stationary-distribution theory for Random Forest ensemble size selection.

problem Determining the optimal number of trees in Random Forests.
method Modeling the ensemble size as a birth-death Markov chain and deriving its stationary distribution.
result The stationary ensemble size BB_* scales as O(ε2)O(\varepsilon^{-2}) as ε0\varepsilon\downarrow 0.

Statistical inference methods are fundamentally important in machine learning. Most state-of-the-art inference algorithms are variants of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) or variational inference (VI). However, both methods struggle with limitations in practice: MCMC methods can be computationally demanding; VI methods …

2018-05-25abs ↗pdf ↗

Particle MCMC involves using a particle filter within an MCMC algorithm. For inference of a model which involves an unobserved stochastic process, the standard implementation uses the particle filter to propose new values for the stochastic process, and MCMC moves to propose new values for the parameters. We show how p…

2014-08-29abs ↗pdf ↗

Stochastic gradient MCMC (SG-MCMC) algorithms have proven useful in scaling Bayesian inference to large datasets under an assumption of i.i.d data. We instead develop an SG-MCMC algorithm to learn the parameters of hidden Markov models (HMMs) for time-dependent data. There are two challenges to applying SG-MCMC in this…

2017-06-14abs ↗pdf ↗

New analysis of SGD with MCMC gradient estimator shows convergence rate and saddle point escape.

problem Analyzing SGD with MCMC gradient estimator under complex conditions.
method Introduced MCMC-SGD, analyzed convergence rate and saddle point escape using Bernstein inequality.
result Proven first order convergence rate O(logK/nK)O(\log K/\sqrt{n K}) and saddle point escape at least O(ε11/2log2(1/ε))O(ε^{-11/2}\log^{2}(1/ε) ) steps.

Proposes MIVI for efficient posterior estimation and design of MCMC transitions.

problem Efficiently estimating posterior distributions in constrained time.
method Combines variational inference and MCMC with a variational distribution and optimized Markov chain.
result Optimized Markov chain improves variational distribution and vice versa, leading to more accurate posteriors.

This study evaluates different normalizing flow architectures for MCMC.

problem Lack of systematic comparison of normalizing flow architectures in MCMC.
method Extensive evaluation of various normalizing flow architectures on different MCMC methods and target distributions.
result Contractive residual flows are the best general-purpose models for MCMC.

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a popular and successful general-purpose tool for Bayesian inference. However, MCMC cannot be practically applied to large data sets because of the prohibitive cost of evaluating every likelihood term at every iteration. Here we present Firefly Monte Carlo (FlyMC) an auxiliary variabl…

2014-03-22abs ↗pdf ↗

Stochastic gradient MCMC (SG-MCMC) has played an important role in large-scale Bayesian learning, with well-developed theoretical convergence properties. In such applications of SG-MCMC, it is becoming increasingly popular to employ distributed systems, where stochastic gradients are computed based on some outdated par…

2016-10-21abs ↗pdf ↗

We propose Subsampling MCMC, a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) framework where the likelihood function for nn observations is estimated from a random subset of mm observations. We introduce a highly efficient unbiased estimator of the log-likelihood based on control variates, such that the computing cost is much smal…

2014-04-16abs ↗pdf ↗

Study improves Bayesian calibration of mechanical properties using active learning and MCMC.

problem Inference of spatially varying material parameters in computational mechanics.
method Comprehensive comparative study of surrogate models and MCMC algorithms.
result Active learning strategy outperforms a priori trained models in posterior estimation.

The modern scale of data has brought new challenges to Bayesian inference. In particular, conventional MCMC algorithms are computationally very expensive for large data sets. A promising approach to solve this problem is embarrassingly parallel MCMC (EP-MCMC), which first partitions the data into multiple subsets and r…

2015-06-10abs ↗pdf ↗

Sampling from posterior distributions using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods can require an exhaustive number of iterations, particularly when the posterior is multi-modal as the MCMC sampler can become trapped in a local mode for a large number of iterations. In this paper, we introduce the pseudo-extended MCMC…

2017-08-17abs ↗pdf ↗

Bayesian neural networks tutorial via MCMC in Python.

problem Bayesian inference for parameter estimation and uncertainty quantification in deep learning models.
method MCMC sampling methods to implement Bayesian inference, including advanced proposal distributions.
result Challenges in sampling multi-modal posterior distributions for Bayesian neural networks.

MetFlow combines MCMC and VI efficiently for better inference.

problem Combining MCMC and VI for efficient inference.
method Introduces MetFlow, a novel MCMC algorithm with Normalizing Flows, and a new method to combine it with VI.
result MetFlow produces expressive variational families with improved computational efficiency.