Related papers: PARNI for importance sampling and density estimati…
Recursive Monte Carlo filters, also called particle filters, are a powerful tool to perform computations in general state space models. We discuss and compare the accept--reject version with the more common sampling importance resampling…
Importance sampling is a technique that is commonly used to speed up Monte Carlo simulation of rare events. However, little is known regarding the design of efficient importance sampling algorithms in the context of queueing networks. The…
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,…
In this paper, we analyse a method for approximating the distribution function and density of a random variable that depends in a non-trivial way on a possibly high number of independent random variables, each with support on the whole real…
High-quality random samples of quantum states are needed for a variety of tasks in quantum information and quantum computation. Searching the high-dimensional quantum state space for a global maximum of an objective function with many local…
The computation of integrals is a fundamental task in the analysis of functional data, which are typically considered as random elements in a space of squared integrable functions. Borrowing ideas from recent advances in the Monte Carlo…
Biasing or importance sampling is a powerful technique in Monte Carlo radiative transfer, and can be applied in different forms to increase the accuracy and efficiency of simulations. One of the drawbacks of the use of biasing is the…
This paper concerns the approximation of smooth, high-dimensional functions from limited samples using polynomials. This task lies at the heart of many applications in computational science and engineering - notably, some of those arising…
Monte Carlo methods, Variational Inference, and their combinations play a pivotal role in sampling from intractable probability distributions. However, current studies lack a unified evaluation framework, relying on disparate performance…
Computing systems interacting with real-world processes must safely and reliably process uncertain data. The Monte Carlo method is a popular approach for computing with such uncertain values. This article introduces a framework for…
A non-parametric extension of control variates is presented. These leverage gradient information on the sampling density to achieve substantial variance reduction. It is not required that the sampling density be normalised. The novel…
Adaptive importance sampling is a class of techniques for finding good proposal distributions for importance sampling. Often the proposal distributions are standard probability distributions whose parameters are adapted based on the…
We introduce a class of Monte Carlo estimators that aim to overcome the rapid growth of variance with dimension often observed for standard estimators by exploiting the target's independence structure. We identify the most basic…
One of the most demanding calculations is to generate random samples from a specified probability distribution (usually with an unknown normalizing prefactor) in a high-dimensional configuration space. One often has to resort to using a…
In the context of Monte Carlo sampling for lattice models, the complexity of the energy landscape often leads to Markov chains being trapped in local optima, thereby increasing the correlation between samples and reducing sampling…
For complex latent variable models, the likelihood function is not available in closed form. In this context, a popular method to perform parameter estimation is Importance Weighted Variational Inference. It essentially maximizes the…
We present density response estimators for Monte Carlo simulations that are based on a reweighting procedure, where the samples of an unperturbed system are used to estimate the properties of a system perturbed by an external harmonic…
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…
We propose a novel sampling framework for inference in probabilistic models: an active learning approach that converges more quickly (in wall-clock time) than Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) benchmarks. The central challenge in…
Statisticians often use Monte Carlo methods to approximate probability distributions, primarily with Markov chain Monte Carlo and importance sampling. Sequential Monte Carlo samplers are a class of algorithms that combine both techniques to…