Related papers: Importance Tempering
Adaptive Monte Carlo methods are very efficient techniques designed to tune simulation estimators on-line. In this work, we present an alternative to stochastic approximation to tune the optimal change of measure in the context of…
We explore efficient estimation of statistical quantities, particularly rare event probabilities, for stochastic reaction networks. Consequently, we propose an importance sampling (IS) approach to improve the Monte Carlo (MC) estimator…
Importance sampling is often used in machine learning when training and testing data come from different distributions. In this paper we propose a new variant of importance sampling that can reduce the variance of importance sampling-based…
The naive importance sampling (IS) estimator generally does not work well in examples involving simultaneous inference on several targets, as the importance weights can take arbitrarily large values, making the estimator highly unstable. In…
This article considers the sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) approximation of ratios of normalizing constants associated to posterior distributions which in principle rely on continuum models. Therefore, the Monte Carlo estimation error and the…
Models of biological systems often have many unknown parameters that must be determined in order for model behavior to match experimental observations. Commonly-used methods for parameter estimation that return point estimates of the…
Importance sampling is a widely used technique to estimate properties of a distribution. This paper investigates trading-off some bias for variance by adaptively winsorizing the importance sampling estimator. The novel winsorizing…
We performed two-dimensional simulated tempering (ST) simulations of the two-dimensional Ising model with different lattice sizes in order to investigate the two-dimensional ST's applicability to dealing with phase transitions and to study…
Multiple importance sampling (MIS) is an increasingly used methodology where several proposal densities are used to approximate integrals, generally involving target probability density functions. The use of several proposals allows for a…
We introduce an algorithm to systematically improve the efficiency of parallel tempering Monte Carlo simulations by optimizing the simulated temperature set. Our approach is closely related to a recently introduced adaptive algorithm that…
Stein importance sampling is a widely applicable technique based on kernelized Stein discrepancy, which corrects the output of approximate sampling algorithms by reweighting the empirical distribution of the samples. A general analysis of…
Gradient information on the sampling distribution can be used to reduce the variance of Monte Carlo estimators via Stein's method. An important application is that of estimating an expectation of a test function along the sample path of a…
This paper proposes a new importance sampling (IS) that is tailored to quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) integration over $\mathbb{R}^s$. IS introduces a multiplicative adjustment to the integrand by compensating the sampling from the proposal…
Computation of extreme quantiles and tail-based risk measures using standard Monte Carlo simulation can be inefficient. A method to speed up computations is provided by importance sampling. We show that importance sampling algorithms,…
This paper provides an introductory overview of how one may employ importance sampling effectively as a tool for solving stochastic optimization formulations incorporating tail risk measures such as Conditional Value-at-Risk. Approximating…
Bayesian methods have received increasing attention in medical research, where sensitivity analysis of prior distributions is essential. Such analyses typically require the evaluation of the posterior distribution of a parameter under…
Bayesian inference involves two main computational challenges. First, in estimating the parameters of some model for the data, the posterior distribution may well be highly multi-modal: a regime in which the convergence to stationarity of…
Sampling is an important tool for estimating large, complex sums and integrals over high dimensional spaces. For instance, important sampling has been used as an alternative to exact methods for inference in belief networks. Ideally, we…
Using MCMC to sample from a target distribution, $\pi(x)$ on a $d$-dimensional state space can be a difficult and computationally expensive problem. Particularly when the target exhibits multimodality, then the traditional methods can fail…
More than twenty years after its introduction, Annealed Importance Sampling (AIS) remains one of the most effective methods for marginal likelihood estimation. It relies on a sequence of distributions interpolating between a tractable…