This Tuesday, our X fertilisation workshop at the interface between molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo statistical methods saw a wee bit of reduction in the audience as some participants had already left Oaxaca. Meaning they missed the talk of Christophe Andrieu on hypocoercivity which could have been another hand-on lecture, given the highly pedagogical contents of the talk. I had seen some parts of the talk in MCqMC 2018 in Rennes and at NUS, but still enjoyed the whole of it very much, and so did the audience given the induced discussion. For instance, previously, I had not seen the connection between the guided random walks of Gustafson and Diaconis, and continuous time processes like PDMP. Which Christophe also covered in his talk. (Also making me realise my colleague Jean Dolbeault in Dauphine was strongly involved in the theoretical analysis of PDMPs!) Then Samuel Power gave another perspective on PDMPs. With another augmentation, connected with time, what he calls trajectorial reversibility. This has the impact of diminishing the event rate, but creates some kind of reversibility which seems to go against the motivation for PDMPs. (Remember that all talks are available as videos on the BIRS webpage.) A remark in the talk worth reiterating is the importance of figuring out which kinds of approximations are acceptable in these approximations. Connecting somewhat with the next talk by Luc Rey-Bellet on a theory of robust approximations. In the sense of Poincaré, Gibbs, Bernstein, &tc. concentration inequalities and large deviations. With applications to rare events.
The fourth and final “hand-on” session was run by Miranda Holmes-Certon on simulating under constraints. Motivated by research on colloids. For which the overdamp Langevin diffusion applies as an accurate model, surprisingly. Which makes a major change from the other talks [most of the workshop!] relying on this diffusion. (With an interesting intermede on molecular velcro made of DNA strands.) Connected with this example, exotic energy landscapes are better described by hard constraints. (Potentially interesting extension to the case when there are too many constraints to explore all of them?) Now, the definition of the measure projected on the manifold defined by the constraints is obviously an important step in simulating the distribution, which density is induced by the gradient of the constraints ∇q(x). The proposed algorithm is in the same spirit as the one presented by Tony the previous day, namely moving along the tangent space then on the normal space to get back to the manifold. A solution that causes issues when the gradient is (near) zero. A great hand-on session which induced massive feedback from the audience.
In the afternoon session, Gersende Fort gave a talk on a generalisation of the Wang-Landau algorithm, which modifies the true weights of the elements of a partition of the sampling space, to increase visits to low [probability] elements and jumps between modes. The idea is to rely on tempered versions of the original weights, learned by stochastic approximation. With an extra layer of adaptivity. Leading to an improvement with parameters that depends on the phase of the stochastic approximation. The second talk was by David Sanders on a recent paper in Chaos about importance sampling for rare events of (deterministic) billiard dynamics. With diffusive limits which tails are hard to evaluate, except by importance sampling. And the last talk of the day was by Anton Martinsson on simulated tempering for a molecular alignment problem. With weights of different temperatures proportional to the inverse of the corresponding normalising constants, which themselves can be learned by a form of bridge sampling if I got it right.
On a very minor note, I heard at breakfast a good story from a fellow participant having to give a talk at a conference that was moved to a very early time in the morning due to an official appearing at a later time and as a result “enjoying” a very small audience to the point that a cleaning lady appeared and started cleaning the board as she could not conceive the talks had already started! Reminding me of this picture at IHP.
. Which connects to a flow transport problem when solving the pde under additional conditions. Unclear to me was the creation of the infinite sequence. This talk was very much at the interface in the spirit of the workshop! (Maybe surprisingly complex when considering the endpoint goal of simulating from a given target.) Jonathan Weare’s talk was about quantum chemistry which translated into finding eigenvalues of an operator. Turning in to a change of basis in a inhumanly large space (10¹⁸⁰ dimensions!). Matt Moore presented 
