Efficient Parameter Sampling for Markov Jump Processes

Fast MCMC sampling for Markov jump processes and extensions

Markov jump processes (or continuous-time Markov chains) are a simple and important class of continuous-time dynamical systems. In this paper, we tackle the problem of simulating from the posterior distribution over paths in these models, given partial and noisy observations. Our approach is an auxiliary variable Gibbs sampler, and is based on the idea of uniformization. This sets up a Markov c...

Automated State-Dependent Importance Sampling for Markov Jump Processes via Sampling from the Zero-Variance Distribution

Many complex systems can be modeled via Markov jump processes. Applications include chemical reactions, population dynamics, and telecommunication networks. Rare-event estimation for such models can be difficult and is often computationally expensive, because typically many (or very long) paths of the Markov jump process need to be simulated in order to observe the rare event. We present a stat...

Bounded Parameter Markov Decision Processes Bounded Parameter Markov Decision Processes

In this paper, we introduce the notion of a bounded parameter Markov decision process as a generalization of the traditional exact MDP. A bounded parameter MDP is a set of exact MDPs speciied by giving upper and lower bounds on transition probabilities and rewards (all the MDPs in the set share the same state and action space). Bounded parameter MDPs can be used to represent variation or uncert...

Markov Chains and Jump Processes

JUMP-Means: Small-Variance Asymptotics for Markov Jump Processes

Markov jump processes (MJPs) are used to model a wide range of phenomena from disease progression to RNA path folding. However, maximum likelihood estimation of parametric models leads to degenerate trajectories and inferential performance is poor in nonparametric models. We take a small-variance asymptotics (SVA) approach to overcome these limitations. We derive the small-variance asymptotics ...