Papers › Efficient Bernoulli factory MCMC for intractable posteriors

Efficient Bernoulli factory MCMC for intractable posteriors

16 Apr 2020arXiv:2004.07471links table onlyarchive 2025-07-28

Dootika Vats, Flávio Gonçalves, Krzysztof Łatuszyński, Gareth O. Roberts

The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.

Accept-reject based Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms have traditionally utilised acceptance probabilities that can be explicitly written as a function of the ratio of the target density at the two contested points. This feature is rendered almost useless in Bayesian posteriors with unknown functional forms. We introduce a new family of MCMC acceptance probabilities that has the distinguishing feature of not being a function of the ratio of the target density at the two points. We present two stable Bernoulli factories that generate events within this class of acceptance probabilities. The efficiency of our methods rely on obtaining reasonable local upper or lower bounds on the target density and we present two classes of problems where such bounds are viable: Bayesian inference for diffusions and MCMC on constrained spaces. The resulting portkey Barker's algorithms are exact and computationally more efficient that the current state-of-the-art.

PaperPDFCode

Code

dvats/PortkeyPaperCode officialmentioned on GitHub report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections