English

The $L_p$-error rate for randomized quasi-Monte Carlo self-normalized importance sampling of unbounded integrands

Numerical Analysis 2025-11-18 v2 Numerical Analysis

Abstract

Self-normalized importance sampling (SNIS) is a fundamental tool in Bayesian inference when the posterior distribution involves an unknown normalizing constant. Although L1L_1-error (bias) and L2L_2-error (root mean square error) estimates of SNIS are well established for bounded integrands, results for unbounded integrands remain limited, especially under randomized quasi-Monte Carlo (RQMC) sampling. In this work, we derive LpL_p-error rate (p1)(p\ge1) for RQMC-based SNIS (RQMC-SNIS) estimators with unbounded integrands on unbounded domains. A key step in our analysis is to first establish the LpL_p-error rate for plain RQMC integration. Our results allow for a broader class of transport maps used to generate samples from RQMC points. Under mild function boundary growth conditions, we further establish LpL_p-error rate of order O(Nβ+ϵ)\mathcal{O}(N^{-\beta + \epsilon}) for RQMC-SNIS estimators, where ϵ>0\epsilon>0 is arbitrarily small, NN is the sample size, and β(0,1]\beta \in (0,1] depends on the boundary growth rate of the resulting integrand. Numerical experiments validate the theoretical results.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2511.10599,
  title  = {The $L_p$-error rate for randomized quasi-Monte Carlo self-normalized importance sampling of unbounded integrands},
  author = {Jiarui Du and Zhijian He},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.10599},
  year   = {2025}
}