Related papers: Importance Tempering
Monte Carlo (MC) techniques are often used to estimate integrals of a multivariate function using randomly generated samples of the function. In light of the increasing interest in uncertainty quantification and robust design applications…
Importance Sampling methods are broadly used to approximate posterior distributions or some of their moments. In its standard approach, samples are drawn from a single proposal distribution and weighted properly. However, since the…
Importance sampling (IS) represents a fundamental technique for a large surge of off-policy reinforcement learning approaches. Policy gradient (PG) methods, in particular, significantly benefit from IS, enabling the effective reuse of…
We consider the problem of estimating an expected outcome from a stochastic simulation model. Our goal is to develop a theoretical framework on importance sampling for such estimation. By investigating the variance of an importance sampling…
We propose an adaptive importance sampling scheme for Gaussian approximations of intractable posteriors. Optimization-based approximations like variational inference can be too inaccurate while existing Monte Carlo methods can be too slow.…
In this work, we propose a smart idea to couple importance sampling and Multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC). We advocate a per level approach with as many importance sampling parameters as the number of levels, which enables us to compute the…
Importance Sampling (IS) is a method for approximating expectations under a target distribution using independent samples from a proposal distribution and the associated importance weights. In many applications, the target distribution is…
We consider the approximation of expectations with respect to the distribution of a latent Markov process given noisy measurements. This is known as the smoothing problem and is often approached with particle and Markov chain Monte Carlo…
Digital constellations formed by hexagonal or other non-square two-dimensional lattices are often used in advanced digital communication systems. The integrals required to evaluate the symbol error rate (SER) of these constellations in the…
We present iterative Monte Carlo algorithm for which the temperature variable is attracted by a critical point. The algorithm combines techniques of single histogram reweighting and linear filtering. The 2d Ising model of ferromagnet is…
Bayesian inference is useful to obtain a predictive distribution with a small generalization error. However, since posterior distributions are rarely evaluated analytically, we employ the variational Bayesian inference or sampling method to…
Bayesian inference under a set of priors, called robust Bayesian analysis, allows for estimation of parameters within a model and quantification of epistemic uncertainty in quantities of interest by bounded (or imprecise) probability.…
We investigate the theoretical foundations of the simulated tempering method and use our findings to design efficient algorithms. Employing a large deviation argument first used for replica exchange molecular dynamics [Plattner et al., J.…
The efficient importance sampling (EIS) method is a general principle for the numerical evaluation of high-dimensional integrals that uses the sequential structure of target integrands to build variance minimising importance samplers.…
We consider the problem of statistical inference when the data is collected via a Thompson Sampling-type algorithm. While Thompson Sampling (TS) is known to be both asymptotically optimal and empirically effective, its adaptive sampling…
The inefficiency of using an unbiased estimator in a Monte Carlo procedure can be quantified using an inefficiency constant, equal to the product of the variance of the estimator and its mean computational cost. We develop methods for…
Importance sampling has become an important tool for the computation of tail-based risk measures. Since such quantities are often determined mainly by rare events standard Monte Carlo can be inefficient and importance sampling provides a…
Modern problems in astronomical Bayesian inference require efficient methods for sampling from complex, high-dimensional, often multi-modal probability distributions. Most popular methods, such as Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling, perform…
We introduce a new Markov-Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach designed for efficient sampling of highly correlated and multimodal posteriors. Parallel tempering, though effective, is a costly technique for sampling such posteriors. Our…
The aim of this paper is to introduce a new Monte Carlo method based on importance sampling techniques for the simulation of stochastic differential equations. The main idea is to combine random walk on squares or rectangles methods with…