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Related papers: Semiparametric Cross Entropy for rare-event simula…

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We study two adaptive importance sampling schemes for estimating the probability of a rare event in the high-dimensional regime $d \to \infty$ with $d$ the dimension. The first scheme is the prominent cross-entropy (CE) method, and the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-03-26 Jason Beh , Yonatan Shadmi , Florian Simatos

Cross-Entropy Method (CEM) is commonly used for planning in model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) where a centralized approach is typically utilized to update the sampling distribution based on only the top-$k$ operation's results on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-19 Zichen Zhang , Jun Jin , Martin Jagersand , Jun Luo , Dale Schuurmans

Calibration methods have been widely studied in survey sampling over the last decades. Viewing calibration as an inverse problem, we extend the calibration technique by using a maximum entropy method. Finding the optimal weights is achieved…

Methodology · Statistics 2009-09-23 Fabrice Gamboa , Jean-Michel Loubes , Paul Rochet

Estimating the entropy of a discrete random variable is a fundamental problem in information theory and related fields. This problem has many applications in various domains, including machine learning, statistics and data compression. Over…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2020-12-22 Yuval Shalev , Amichai Painsky , Irad Ben-Gal

Revision of the paper previously entitled "Learning a Machine for the Decision in a Partially Observable Markov Universe" In this paper, we are interested in optimal decisions in a partially observable universe. Our approach is to directly…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2007-06-13 Frederic Dambreville

Maximum entropy method is a constructive criterion for setting up a probability distribution maximally non-committal to missing information on the basis of partial knowledge, usually stated as constrains on expectation values of some…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2015-07-20 Jorge Fernandez-de-Cossio , Jorge Fernandez-de-Cossio Diaz

This paper considers importance sampling for estimation of rare-event probabilities in a specific collection of Markovian jump processes used for e.g. modelling of credit risk. Previous attempts at designing importance sampling algorithms…

Probability · Mathematics 2021-12-02 Boualem Djehiche , Henrik Hult , Pierre Nyquist

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-20 Liam A. Kruse , Marc R. Schlichting , Mykel J. Kochenderfer

We propose a class of strongly efficient rare event simulation estimators for random walks and compound Poisson processes with a regularly varying increment/jump-size distribution in a general large deviations regime. Our estimator is based…

Probability · Mathematics 2017-06-14 Bohan Chen , Jose Blanchet , Chang-Han Rhee , Bert Zwart

Recently, deep learning models have achieved great success in computer vision applications, relying on large-scale class-balanced datasets. However, imbalanced class distributions still limit the wide applicability of these models due to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-08-05 Yechan Kim , Younkwan Lee , Moongu Jeon

We study the cross-entropy method (CEM) for the non-convex optimization of a continuous and parameterized objective function and introduce a differentiable variant that enables us to differentiate the output of CEM with respect to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-18 Brandon Amos , Denis Yarats

Modern deep learning is primarily an experimental science, in which empirical advances occasionally come at the expense of probabilistic rigor. Here we focus on one such example; namely the use of the categorical cross-entropy loss to model…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-11-11 Elliott Gordon-Rodriguez , Gabriel Loaiza-Ganem , Geoff Pleiss , John P. Cunningham

Entropy estimation is of practical importance in information theory and statistical science. Many existing entropy estimators suffer from fast growing estimation bias with respect to dimensionality, rendering them unsuitable for…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Ziqiao Ao , Jinglai Li

Cross entropy (XE) measure is a widely used benchmarking to demonstrate quantum computational advantage from sampling problems, such as random circuit sampling using superconducting qubits and boson sampling (BS). We present a heuristic…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2023-07-19 Changhun Oh , Liang Jiang , Bill Fefferman

Estimating the probability that a sum of random variables (RVs) exceeds a given threshold is a well-known challenging problem. Closed-form expression of the sum distribution is usually intractable and presents an open problem. A crude Monte…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2014-09-23 Nadhir Ben Rached , Fatma Benkhelifa , Abla Kammoun , Mohamed-Slim Alouini , Raul Tempone

We introduce the problem of \emph{entropy equivalence testing} for probability distributions, a relaxation of the well-studied closeness testing problem, where the distribution testing algorithm is now only required to distinguish, given…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Clément L. Canonne , Yash Pote , Jonathan Scarlett , Joy Qiping Yang

This paper considers the classical problem of sampling with Monte Carlo methods a target rare event distribution defined by a score function that is very expensive to compute. We assume we can build using evaluations of the true score, an…

Computation · Statistics 2024-10-25 Frédéric Cérou , Patrick Héas , Mathias Rousset

Random geometric graphs defined on Euclidean subspaces, also called Gilbert graphs, are widely used to model spatially embedded networks across various domains. In such graphs, nodes are located at random in Euclidean space, and any two…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-04-23 Sarat Moka , Christian Hirsch , Volker Schmidt , Dirk Kroese

The cross entropy loss is widely used due to its effectiveness and solid theoretical grounding. However, as training progresses, the loss tends to focus on hard to classify samples, which may prevent the network from obtaining gains in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-14 Barak Battash , Lior Wolf , Tamir Hazan

We apply two variations of the principle of Minimum Cross Entropy (the Kullback information measure) to fit parameterized probability density models to observed data densities. For an array beamforming problem with P incident narrowband…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2008-06-24 Cheng-Yuan Liou , Bruce R. Musicus