Gareth Roberts

Joris Bierkens, Sebastiano Grazzi, Kengo Kamatani et al.

This paper introduces the Boomerang Sampler as a novel class of continuous-time non-reversible Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms. The methodology begins by representing the target density as a density, $e^{-U}$, with respect to a prescribed (usually) Gaussian measure and constructs a continuous trajectory consisting of a piecewise elliptical path. The method moves from one elliptical orbit to another according to a rate function which can be written in terms of $U$. We demonstrate that the method is easy to implement and demonstrate empirically that it can out-perform existing benchmark piecewise deterministic Markov processes such as the bouncy particle sampler and the Zig-Zag. In the Bayesian statistics context, these competitor algorithms are of substantial interest in the large data context due to the fact that they can adopt data subsampling techniques which are exact (ie induce no error in the stationary distribution). We demonstrate theoretically and empirically that we can also construct a control-variate subsampling boomerang sampler which is also exact, and which possesses remarkable scaling properties in the large data limit. We furthermore illustrate a factorised version on the simulation of diffusion bridges.

Giacomo Zanella, Gareth Roberts

We propose a Monte Carlo algorithm to sample from high dimensional probability distributions that combines Markov chain Monte Carlo and importance sampling. We provide a careful theoretical analysis, including guarantees on robustness to high dimensionality, explicit comparison with standard Markov chain Monte Carlo methods and illustrations of the potential improvements in efficiency. Simple and concrete intuition is provided for when the novel scheme is expected to outperform standard schemes. When applied to Bayesian variable-selection problems, the novel algorithm is orders of magnitude more efficient than available alternative sampling schemes and enables fast and reliable fully Bayesian inferences with tens of thousand regressors.