Related papers: Importance sampling for the simulation of reinsura…
Importance sampling is a variance reduction technique for efficient estimation of rare-event probabilities by Monte Carlo. In standard importance sampling schemes, the system is simulated using an a priori fixed change of measure suggested…
In solving simulation-based stochastic root-finding or optimization problems that involve rare events, such as in extreme quantile estimation, running crude Monte Carlo can be prohibitively inefficient. To address this issue, importance…
An importance sampling approach for sampling copula models is introduced. We propose two algorithms that improve Monte Carlo estimators when the functional of interest depends mainly on the behaviour of the underlying random vector when at…
Importance sampling is a Monte Carlo method which designs estimators of expectations under a target distribution using weighted samples from a proposal distribution. When the target distribution is complex, such as multimodal distributions…
Statistical model checking avoids the exponential growth of states associated with probabilistic model checking by estimating properties from multiple executions of a system and by giving results within confidence bounds. Rare properties…
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…
This study presents an importance sampling formulation based on adaptively relaxing parameters from the indicator function and/or the probability density function. The formulation embodies the prevalent mathematical concept of relaxing a…
The goal of importance sampling is to estimate the expected value of a given function with respect to a probability measure $\nu$ using a random sample of size $n$ drawn from a different probability measure $\mu$. If the two measures $\mu$…
Importance-weighting is a popular and well-researched technique for dealing with sample selection bias and covariate shift. It has desirable characteristics such as unbiasedness, consistency and low computational complexity. However,…
Importance sampling is a popular technique in Bayesian inference: by reweighting samples drawn from a proposal distribution we are able to obtain samples and moment estimates from a Bayesian posterior over latent variables. Recent work,…
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…
In many domains, the exploration process of reinforcement learning will be too costly as it requires trying out suboptimal policies, resulting in a need for off-policy evaluation, in which a target policy is evaluated based on data…
One of the main problems of importance sampling in Bayesian networks is representation of the importance function, which should ideally be as close as possible to the posterior joint distribution. Typically, we represent an importance…
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…
The sampling importance resampling method is widely utilized in various fields, such as numerical integration and statistical simulation. In this paper, two modified methods are presented by incorporating two variance reduction techniques…
Importance sampling (IS) is a Monte Carlo technique that relies on weighted samples, simulated from a proposal distribution, to estimate intractable integrals. The quality of the estimators improves with the number of samples. However, for…
Adaptive importance sampling is a widely spread Monte Carlo technique that uses a re-weighting strategy to iteratively estimate the so-called target distribution. A major drawback of adaptive importance sampling is the large variance of the…
In machine learning models, the estimation of errors is often complex due to distribution bias, particularly in spatial data such as those found in environmental studies. We introduce an approach based on the ideas of importance sampling to…
Likelihood-free inference involves inferring parameter values given observed data and a simulator model. The simulator is computer code which takes parameters, performs stochastic calculations, and outputs simulated data. In this work, we…
The marginal likelihood is a central tool for drawing Bayesian inference about the number of components in mixture models. It is often approximated since the exact form is unavailable. A bias in the approximation may be due to an incomplete…