Related papers: Calculating the Expected Value of Sample Informati…
We consider large scale empirical risk minimization (ERM) problems, where both the problem dimension and variable size is large. In these cases, most second order methods are infeasible due to the high cost in both computing the Hessian…
Increasingly, medical research is dependent on data collected for non-research purposes, such as electronic health records data (EHR). EHR data and other large databases can be prone to measurement error in key exposures, and unadjusted…
Some classical uncertainty quantification problems require the estimation of multiple expectations. Estimating all of them accurately is crucial and can have a major impact on the analysis to perform, and standard existing Monte Carlo…
We introduce dynamic nested sampling: a generalisation of the nested sampling algorithm in which the number of "live points" varies to allocate samples more efficiently. In empirical tests the new method significantly improves calculation…
The effective sample size (ESS) is widely used in sample-based simulation methods for assessing the quality of a Monte Carlo approximation of a given distribution and of related integrals. In this paper, we revisit the approximation of the…
Hierarchically-organized data arise naturally in many psychology and neuroscience studies. As the standard assumption of independent and identically distributed samples does not hold for such data, two important problems are to accurately…
This paper deals with the construction of a metamodel (i.e. a simplified mathematical model) for a stochastic computer code (also called stochastic numerical model or stochastic simulator), where stochastic means that the code maps the…
A new semi-parametric Expected Shortfall (ES) estimation and forecasting framework is proposed. The proposed approach is based on a two-step estimation procedure. The first step involves the estimation of Value-at-Risk (VaR) at different…
Importance Sampling (IS) is a widely used variance reduction technique for enhancing the efficiency of Monte Carlo methods, particularly in rare-event simulation and related applications. Despite its effectiveness, the performance of IS is…
Many Monte Carlo (MC) and importance sampling (IS) methods use mixture models (MMs) for their simplicity and ability to capture multimodal distributions. Recently, subtractive mixture models (SMMs), i.e. MMs with negative coefficients, have…
Estimation in the deformable template model is a big challenge in image analysis. The issue is to estimate an atlas of a population. This atlas contains a template and the corresponding geometrical variability of the observed shapes. The…
Bootstrap smoothed (bagged) parameter estimators have been proposed as an improvement on estimators found after preliminary data-based model selection. The key result of Efron (2014) is a very convenient and widely applicable formula for a…
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,…
Safety evaluation of self-driving technologies has been extensively studied. One recent approach uses Monte Carlo based evaluation to estimate the occurrence probabilities of safety-critical events as safety measures. These Monte Carlo…
We develop nested variational inference (NVI), a family of methods that learn proposals for nested importance samplers by minimizing an forward or reverse KL divergence at each level of nesting. NVI is applicable to many commonly-used…
Gaussian Boson Sampling (GBS) have shown advantages over classical methods for performing some specific sampling tasks. To fully harness the computational power of GBS, there has been great interest in identifying their practical…
To improve the efficiency of Monte Carlo estimation, practitioners are turning to biased Markov chain Monte Carlo procedures that trade off asymptotic exactness for computational speed. The reasoning is sound: a reduction in variance due to…
Despite significant recent progress in the area of Brain-Computer Interface (BCI), there are numerous shortcomings associated with collecting Electroencephalography (EEG) signals in real-world environments. These include, but are not…
Sequential decision making significantly speeds up research and is more cost-effective compared to fixed-n methods. We present a method for sequential decision making for stratified count data that retains Type-I error guarantee or false…
Simulated tempering (ST) is an established Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method for sampling from a multimodal density $\pi(\theta)$. Typically, ST involves introducing an auxiliary variable $k$ taking values in a finite subset of $[0,1]$…