Related papers: PARNI for importance sampling and density estimati…
The Multilevel Monte Carlo method is an efficient variance reduction technique. It uses a sequence of coarse approximations to reduce the computational cost in uncertainty quantification applications. The method is nowadays often considered…
Using the concept of finite-size scaling, Monte Carlo calculations of various models have become a very useful tool for the study of critical phenomena, with the system linear dimension as a variable. As an example, several recent studies…
Importance sampling is widely used in machine learning and statistics, but its power is limited by the restriction of using simple proposals for which the importance weights can be tractably calculated. We address this problem by studying…
Recent advances in machine learning have led to the development of new methods for enhancing Monte Carlo methods such as Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and importance sampling (IS). One such method is normalizing flows, which use a neural…
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…
In parameter estimation problems one computes a posterior distribution over uncertain parameters defined jointly by a prior distribution, a model, and noisy data. Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is often used for the numerical solution of…
We describe a simple Importance Sampling strategy for Monte Carlo simulations based on a least squares optimization procedure. With several numerical examples, we show that such Least Squares Importance Sampling (LSIS) provides efficiency…
This paper is a tutorial and literature review on sampling algorithms. We have two main types of sampling in statistics. The first type is survey sampling which draws samples from a set or population. The second type is sampling from…
In this manuscript, we derive optimal conditions for building function approximations that minimize variance when used as importance sampling estimators for Monte Carlo integration problems. Particularly, we study the problem of finding the…
We discuss the efficiency of Monte Carlo methods in solving continuum radiative transfer problems. The sampling of the radiation field and convergence of dust temperature calculations in the case of optically thick clouds are both studied.…
We discuss the improvement in the accuracy of a Monte Carlo integration that can be obtained by optimization of the `a-priori weights' of the various channels. These channels may be either the strata in a stratified-sampling approach, or…
When the target parameter for inference is a real-valued, continuous function of probabilities in the $k$-sample multinomial problem, variance estimation may be challenging. In small samples or when the function is nondifferentiable at the…
Importance sampling is a well developed method in statistics. Given a random variable $X$, the problem of estimating its expected value $\mu$ is addressed. The standard approach is to use the sample mean as an estimator $\bar x$. In…
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 sign problem is a notorious problem, which occurs in Monte Carlo simulations of a system with a partition function whose integrand is not positive. One way to simulate such a system is to use the factorization method where one enforces…
In recent decades, a number of profound theorems concerning approximation of hard counting problems have appeared. These include estimation of the permanent, estimating the volume of a convex polyhedron, and counting (approximately) the…
Multi-dimensional density of states provides a useful description of complex frustrated systems. Recent advances in Monte Carlo methods enable efficient calculation of the density of states and related quantities, which renew the interest…
Distortion risk measures play a critical role in quantifying risks associated with uncertain outcomes. Accurately estimating these risk measures in the context of computationally expensive simulation models that lack analytical tractability…
Monte Carlo method is a broad class of computational algorithms that rely on repeated random sampling to obtain numerical results. They are often used in physical and mathematical problems and are most useful when it is difficult or…
The Effective Sample Size (ESS) is an important measure of efficiency of Monte Carlo methods such as Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and Importance Sampling (IS) techniques. In the IS context, an approximation $\widehat{ESS}$ of the…