21 research outputs found
On an adaptive preconditioned Crank-Nicolson MCMC algorithm for infinite dimensional Bayesian inferences
Many scientific and engineering problems require to perform Bayesian
inferences for unknowns of infinite dimension. In such problems, many standard
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms become arbitrary slow under the mesh
refinement, which is referred to as being dimension dependent. To this end, a
family of dimensional independent MCMC algorithms, known as the preconditioned
Crank-Nicolson (pCN) methods, were proposed to sample the infinite dimensional
parameters. In this work we develop an adaptive version of the pCN algorithm,
where the covariance operator of the proposal distribution is adjusted based on
sampling history to improve the simulation efficiency. We show that the
proposed algorithm satisfies an important ergodicity condition under some mild
assumptions. Finally we provide numerical examples to demonstrate the
performance of the proposed method
A hybrid adaptive MCMC algorithm in function spaces
The preconditioned Crank-Nicolson (pCN) method is a Markov Chain Monte Carlo
(MCMC) scheme, specifically designed to perform Bayesian inferences in function
spaces. Unlike many standard MCMC algorithms, the pCN method can preserve the
sampling efficiency under the mesh refinement, a property referred to as being
dimension independent. In this work we consider an adaptive strategy to further
improve the efficiency of pCN. In particular we develop a hybrid adaptive MCMC
method: the algorithm performs an adaptive Metropolis scheme in a chosen finite
dimensional subspace, and a standard pCN algorithm in the complement space of
the chosen subspace. We show that the proposed algorithm satisfies certain
important ergodicity conditions. Finally with numerical examples we demonstrate
that the proposed method has competitive performance with existing adaptive
algorithms.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1511.0583
Geometric ergodicity of the Random Walk Metropolis with position-dependent proposal covariance
We consider a Metropolis-Hastings method with proposal kernel
, where is the current state. After discussing
specific cases from the literature, we analyse the ergodicity properties of the
resulting Markov chains. In one dimension we find that suitable choice of
can change the ergodicity properties compared to the Random Walk
Metropolis case , either for the better or worse. In
higher dimensions we use a specific example to show that judicious choice of
can produce a chain which will converge at a geometric rate to its
limiting distribution when probability concentrates on an ever narrower ridge
as grows, something which is not true for the Random Walk Metropolis.Comment: 15 pages + appendices, 4 figure
Multilevel Sequential Monte Carlo with Dimension-Independent Likelihood-Informed Proposals
In this article we develop a new sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) method for
multilevel (ML) Monte Carlo estimation. In particular, the method can be used
to estimate expectations with respect to a target probability distribution over
an infinite-dimensional and non-compact space as given, for example, by a
Bayesian inverse problem with Gaussian random field prior. Under suitable
assumptions the MLSMC method has the optimal bound on the
cost to obtain a mean-square error of . The algorithm is
accelerated by dimension-independent likelihood-informed (DILI) proposals
designed for Gaussian priors, leveraging a novel variation which uses empirical
sample covariance information in lieu of Hessian information, hence eliminating
the requirement for gradient evaluations. The efficiency of the algorithm is
illustrated on two examples: inversion of noisy pressure measurements in a PDE
model of Darcy flow to recover the posterior distribution of the permeability
field, and inversion of noisy measurements of the solution of an SDE to recover
the posterior path measure
Perturbation bounds for Monte Carlo within metropolis via restricted approximations
The Monte Carlo within Metropolis (MCwM) algorithm, interpreted as a perturbed Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithm, provides an approach for approximate sampling when the target distribution is intractable. Assuming the unperturbed Markov chain is geometrically ergodic, we show explicit estimates of the
difference between the n-th step distributions of the perturbed MCwM and the
unperturbed MH chains. These bounds are based on novel perturbation results
for Markov chains which are of interest beyond the MCwM setting. To apply the
bounds, we need to control the difference between the transition probabilities
of the two chains and to verify stability of the perturbed chain.
Keywords: Markov chain Monte Carlo, restricted approximation, Monte
Carlo within Metropolis, intractable likelihood
MALA-within-Gibbs samplers for high-dimensional distributions with sparse conditional structure
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) samplers are numerical methods for drawing samples from a given target probability distribution. We discuss one particular MCMC sampler, the MALA-within-Gibbs sampler, from the theoretical and practical perspectives. We first show that the acceptance ratio and step size of this sampler are independent of the overall problem dimension when (i) the target distribution has sparse conditional structure, and (ii) this structure is reflected in the partial updating strategy of MALA-within-Gibbs. If, in addition, the target density is blockwise log-concave, then the sampler's convergence rate is independent of dimension. From a practical perspective, we expect that MALA-within-Gibbs is useful for solving high-dimensional Bayesian inference problems where the posterior exhibits sparse conditional structure at least approximately. In this context, a partitioning of the state that correctly reflects the sparse conditional structure must be found, and we illustrate this process in two numerical examples. We also discuss trade-offs between the block size used for partial updating and computational requirements that may increase with the number of blocks