Archive for coupling
MCMC for conditional Bernoullis
Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags Bernoulli distribution, Constrained Monte Carlo, coupling, coupling from the past, quicksort, simulation on February 22, 2021 by xi'anJeremy Heng, Pierre Jacob [currently in Paris!] and Nianqiao Ju are in a recent arXival considering the simulation of a conditional Bernoulli, namely generating a vector of N Bernoullis with different probabilities under the constraint that their sum is fixed as I. Rather than going for a perfect simulator, with cost O(NI), they opt for the simplest of MCMC samplers, where a 0 and a 1 entries are exchanged at random. In connection with a recent spate of MCMC works using coupling, they establish convergence in O(N log N) steps, even when the probabilities are arbitrarily close to zero and one. Including the case when they are Uniformly generated. From a mundane perspective, I wonder at the appeal of using the probabilities to select the exchange pair. I realise sorting the probabilities is already of order O(N log N) avoiding selecting highly probable 1’s and highly probable 0’s should speed up converge, unless the gain is negligible. And to link MCMC and exact simulation in this setting, what would the cost of perfect sampling by sampling from the past be? Presumably much higher since there is little chance a total ordering can be found on the starting states.
Couplings and Monte Carlo [advanced graduate course at Dauphine by Pierre Jacob]
Posted in Kids, pictures, Statistics, Travel with tags coupling, graduate course, Monte Carlo methods, optimal transport, Paris, Pierre Jacob, Université Paris Dauphine on January 20, 2020 by xi'anAs a visiting professor at Paris-Dauphine next month, Pierre Jacob will give a series of lectures on coupling and Monte Carlo. Next month on Feb. 13, 14, 25 27, at Université Paris-Dauphine, the first two starting at 8:30 (room E) and the last two starting at 13:45 (room F and D201, respectively). Attendance is open to all and material will be made available on the lecture webpage.
unbiased MCMC discussed at the RSS tomorrow night
Posted in Books, Kids, pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags AABI, coupling, discussion paper, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm, MCMC, Read paper, Royal Statistical Society, Series B, unbiasedness, Université Paris Dauphine, Vancouver on December 10, 2019 by xi'anThe paper ‘Unbiased Markov chain Monte Carlo methods with couplings’ by Pierre Jacob et al. will be discussed (or Read) tomorrow at the Royal Statistical Society, 12 Errol Street, London, tomorrow night, Wed 11 December, at 5pm London time. With a pre-discussion session at 3pm, involving Chris Sherlock and Pierre Jacob, and chaired by Ioanna Manolopoulou. While I will alas miss this opportunity, due to my trip to Vancouver over the weekend, it is great that that the young tradition of pre-discussion sessions has been rekindled as it helps put the paper into perspective for a wider audience and thus makes the more formal Read Paper session more profitable. As we discussed the paper in Paris Dauphine with our graduate students a few weeks ago, we will for certain send one or several written discussions to Series B!