We give conditions under which a Markov chain constructed via parallel or simulated tempering is guaranteed to be rapidly mixing, which are applicable to a wide range of multimodal distributions arising in Bayesian statistical inference and statistical mechanics. We provide lower bounds on the spectral gaps of parallel and simulated tempering. These bounds imply a single set of sufficient condi...

The most efficient MC weights for the calculation of physical, canonical expectation values are not necessarily those of the canonical ensemble. The use of suitably generalized ensembles can lead to a much faster convergence of the simulation. Although not realized by nature, these ensembles can be implemented on computers. In recent years generalized ensembles have in particular been studied f...

I present a new Markov chain sampling method appropriate for distributions with isolated modes. Like the recently-developed method of \simulated tempering", the \tempered transition" method uses a series of distributions that interpolate between the distribution of interest and a distribution for which sampling is easier. The new method has the advantage that it does not require approximate val...

To investigate the effect of tempering treatment on mechanical properties and the microstructure of DIN 1.4021 Martensitic Stainless Steel, austenite treatment was conducted for the samples at 1000 ºC temperature for 60 min and then the samples were oil quenched. Later, tempering treatments were performed for the samples at 500 ºC and 700 ºC temperatures for 2 and 5 h, respectively; then quench...

Variational inference (VI) combined with data subsampling enables approximate posterior inference with large data sets for otherwise intractable models, but suffers from poor local optima. We first formulate a deterministic annealing approach for the generic class of conditionally conjugate exponential family models. This algorithm uses a temperature parameter that deterministically deforms the...

Local hardness increasing on the surface of the power plant rotor may result in severe damages. One major solution for rapid repairing of the rotors is the adaptive tempering heat treatment. For this purpose, after identification of the damaged rotor, initial investigations and tests (such as visual inspection, chemical analysis, nondestructive hardness measurements and replica or on-site metal...

mechanical properties of dissimilar weld joints between gost09ch16n4b (a martensitic stainless steel) and aisi 4130 thin sheets made by gas tungsten arc welding (gtaw) were studied using er410nimo and er100s-g filler metals in post weld heat treated conditions. heat treatment cycles consisted of austenitization at 900, 950 and 1000 °c for 1 h and this was followed by oil cooling and tempering a...

This study on potentiometric titration of polyprotic acids and bases using a glass electrode is a continuation of our paper (Maslarska V., Tencheva J., Budevsky O., Anal. Bioanal. Chem., 375, 217 (2003)) [1]. The derived earlier theoretical equation was found to fit well the experimental data. A commercial software was applied and main attention was paid to the analytical result rather than to ...

Simulated tempering (ST) is an established Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method for sampling from a multimodal density π(θ). Typically, ST involves introducing an auxiliary variable k taking values in a finite subset of [0, 1] and indexing a set of tempered distributions, say πk(θ) ∝ π(θ) k. In this case, small values of k encourage better mixing, but samples from π are only obtained when the...

This article introduces a new variant on the popular optimization method, simulated annealing, herein called modified discrete-state simulated annealing. A guide in practical implementation of simulated tempering is also provided. The algorithms are tested in the design of an ideal collector for a travelling wave tube amplifier. keywords: simulated annealing, simulated tempering, travelling wav...