Related papers: On the existence of moments for high dimensional i…
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 a Monte Carlo technique for efficiently estimating the likelihood of rare events by biasing the sampling distribution towards the rare event of interest. By drawing weighted samples from a learned proposal…
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…
Gaussian mixture models are universal approximators in the sense that any smooth density can be approximated arbitrarily well with a Gaussian mixture model with enough components. Due to their broad expressive power, Gaussian mixture models…
The performance of the Monte Carlo sampling methods relies on the crucial choice of a proposal density. The notion of optimality is fundamental to design suitable adaptive procedures of the proposal density within Monte Carlo schemes. This…
Importance sampling approximates expectations with respect to a target measure by using samples from a proposal measure. The performance of the method over large classes of test functions depends heavily on the closeness between both…
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,…
Gaussian time-series models are often specified through their spectral density. Such models present several computational challenges, in particular because of the non-sparse nature of the covariance matrix. We derive a fast approximation of…
Multiple importance sampling (MIS) methods use a set of proposal distributions from which samples are drawn. Each sample is then assigned an importance weight that can be obtained according to different strategies. This work is motivated by…
The basic idea of importance sampling is to use independent samples from a proposal measure in order to approximate expectations with respect to a target measure. It is key to understand how many samples are required in order to guarantee…
In multiple importance sampling we combine samples from a finite list of proposal distributions. When those proposal distributions are used to create control variates, it is possible (Owen and Zhou, 2000) to bound the ratio of the resulting…
We develop flexible methods of deriving variational inference for models with complex latent variable structure. By splitting the variables in these models into "global" parameters and "local" latent variables, we define a class of…
We consider estimating the parameters of a Gaussian mixture density with a given number of components best representing a given set of weighted samples. We adopt a density interpretation of the samples by viewing them as a discrete Dirac…
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…
Probability density estimation is a core problem of statistics and signal processing. Moment methods are an important means of density estimation, but they are generally strongly dependent on the choice of feasible functions, which severely…
We establish a general concentration result for the 1-Wasserstein distance between the empirical measure of a sequence of random variables and its expectation. Unlike standard results that rely on independence (e.g., Sanov's theorem) or…
Recently developed particle flow algorithms provide an alternative to importance sampling for drawing particles from a posterior distribution, and a number of particle filters based on this principle have been proposed. Samples are drawn…
This paper proposes a novel method for testing observability in Gaussian models using discrete density approximations (deterministic samples) of (multivariate) Gaussians. Our notion of observability is defined by the existence of the…
Importance sampling is used to approximate Bayes' rule in many computational approaches to Bayesian inverse problems, data assimilation and machine learning. This paper reviews and further investigates the required sample size for…
Following [1], the aim of this paper is to analyze the relative weighted entropy involving the central moments weight functions. We compare the standard relative entropy with the weighted case in two particular forms of Gaussian…