ergodicity
A Theoretical Comparison of No-U-Turn Sampler Variants: Necessary and Sufficient Convergence Conditions and Mixing Time Analysis under Gaussian Targets
Gruffaz, Samuel, Kim, Kyurae, Guehtar, Fares, Duval-decaix, Hadrien, Trautmann, Pacôme
The No-U-Turn Sampler (NUTS) is the computational workhorse of modern Bayesian software libraries, yet its qualitative and quantitative convergence guarantees were established only recently. A significant gap remains in the theoretical comparison of its two main variants: NUTS-mul and NUTS-BPS, which use multinomial sampling and biased progressive sampling, respectively, for index selection. In this paper, we address this gap in three contributions. First, we derive the first necessary conditions for geometric ergodicity for both variants. Second, we establish the first sufficient conditions for geometric ergodicity and ergodicity for NUTS-mul. Third, we obtain the first mixing time result for NUTS-BPS on a standard Gaussian distribution. Our results show that NUTS-mul and NUTS-BPS exhibit nearly identical qualitative behavior, with geometric ergodicity depending on the tail properties of the target distribution. However, they differ quantitatively in their convergence rates. More precisely, when initialized in the typical set of the canonical Gaussian measure, the mixing times of both NUTS-mul and NUTS-BPS scale as $O(d^{1/4})$ up to logarithmic factors, where $d$ denotes the dimension. Nevertheless, the associated constants are strictly smaller for NUTS-BPS.
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Sparse Weak-Form Discovery of Stochastic Generators
A, Eshwar R, Honnavar, Gajanan V.
The proposed algorithm seeks to provide a novel data-driven framework for the discovery of stochastic differential equations (SDEs) by application of the Weak-formulation to stochastic SINDy. This Weak formulation of the algorithm provides a noise-robust methodology that avoids traditional noisy derivative computation using finite differences. An additional novelty is the adoption of spatial Gaussian test functions in place of temporal test functions, wherein the use of the kernel weight $K_j(X_{t_n})$ guarantees unbiasedness in expectation and prevents the structural regression bias that is otherwise pertinent with temporal test functions. The proposed framework converts the SDE identification problem into two SINDy based linear sparse identification problems. We validate the algorithm on three SDEs, for which we recover all active non-linear terms with coefficient errors below 4%, stationary-density total-variation distances below 0.01, and autocorrelation functions that reproduce true relaxation timescales across all three benchmarks faithfully.
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- Europe > United Kingdom > England > Cambridgeshire > Cambridge (0.04)
Stabilizing Fixed-Point Iteration for Markov Chain Poisson Equations
Poisson equations underpin average-reward reinforcement learning, but beyond ergodicity they can be ill-posed, meaning that solutions are non-unique and standard fixed point iterations can oscillate on reducible or periodic chains. We study finite-state Markov chains with $n$ states and transition matrix $P$. We show that all non-decaying modes are captured by a real peripheral invariant subspace $\mathcal{K}(P)$, and that the induced operator on the quotient space $\mathbb{R}^n/\mathcal{K}(P)$ is strictly contractive, yielding a unique quotient solution. Building on this viewpoint, we develop an end-to-end pipeline that learns the chain structure, estimates an anchor based gauge map, and runs projected stochastic approximation to estimate a gauge-fixed representative together with an associated peripheral residual. We prove $\widetilde{O}(T^{-1/2})$ convergence up to projection estimation error, enabling stable Poisson equation learning for multichain and periodic regimes with applications to performance evaluation of average-reward reinforcement learning beyond ergodicity.
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- North America > United States > California > Alameda County > Berkeley (0.04)
- Europe > United Kingdom > England > Cambridgeshire > Cambridge (0.04)
Supplemental Materials Data Augmentation for Bayesian Inference from Privatized Data S 1 Statement on Societal Impacts
We do not foresee direct negative societal impact from the current work. Also, one may argue that our work is catalytic to enhancing the'disclosure risk' of individuals, i.e. an adversary might be able to make accurate Granted, no existing privacy frameworks can guard against this. We prove its ergodicity in Theorem S-3.1, which implies Theorem 3.3 . The model is such that the set { x: f ( x |) > 0 } does not depend on . The Metropolis-within-Gibbs sampler is aperiodic by construction, since some proposals can be rejected.
ESH_Dynamics-20
In contrast to MCMC approaches like Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, no stochastic step is required. Instead, the proposed deterministic dynamics in an extended state space exactly sample the target distribution, specified by an energy function, under an assumption of ergodicity. Alternatively, the dynamics can be interpreted as a normalizing flow that samples a specified energy model without training.
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- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Machine Learning > Neural Networks (0.94)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Machine Learning > Statistical Learning (0.91)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Representation & Reasoning > Uncertainty > Bayesian Inference (0.46)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Machine Learning > Learning Graphical Models > Directed Networks > Bayesian Learning (0.46)
Stereographic Multi-Try Metropolis Algorithms for Heavy-tailed Sampling
Multi-proposal MCMC algorithms have recently gained attention for their potential to improve performance, especially through parallel implementation on modern hardware. This paper introduces a novel family of gradient-free MCMC algorithms that combine the multi-try Metropolis (MTM) with stereographic MCMC framework, specifically designed for efficient sampling from heavy-tailed targets. The proposed stereographic multi-try Metropolis (SMTM) algorithm not only outperforms traditional Euclidean MTM and existing stereographic random-walk Metropolis methods, but also avoids the pathological convergence behavior often observed in MTM and demonstrates strong robustness to tuning. These properties are supported by scaling analysis and extensive simulation studies.
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