Related papers: Optimal Unbiased Estimation for Expected Cumulativ…
In this paper we present an enhancement of the regression-based variance reduction approaches recently proposed in Belomestny et al. This enhancement is based on a truncation of the control variate and allows for a significant reduction of…
Policy evaluation via Monte Carlo (MC) simulation is at the core of many MC Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms (e.g., policy gradient methods). In this context, the designer of the learning system specifies an interaction budget that…
The most relevant problems in discounted reinforcement learning involve estimating the mean of a function under the stationary distribution of a Markov reward process, such as the expected return in policy evaluation, or the policy gradient…
Estimation of value in policy gradient methods is a fundamental problem. Generalized Advantage Estimation (GAE) is an exponentially-weighted estimator of an advantage function similar to $\lambda$-return. It substantially reduces the…
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…
This paper introduces a new algorithm for numerically computing equilibrium (i.e. stationary) distributions for Markov chains and Markov jump processes with either a very large finite state space or a countably infinite state space. The…
Many simulation problems require the estimation of a ratio of two expectations. In recent years Monte Carlo estimators have been proposed that can estimate such ratios without bias. We investigate the theoretical properties of such…
In classification with a reject option, the classifier is allowed in uncertain cases to abstain from prediction. The classical cost-based model of a reject option classifier requires the cost of rejection to be defined explicitly. An…
We investigate in this paper an alternative method to simulation based recursive importance sampling procedure to estimate the optimal change of measure for Monte Carlo simulations. We propose an algorithm which combines (vector and…
In this paper we consider the estimation of unknown parameters in Bayesian inverse problems. In most cases of practical interest, there are several barriers to performing such estimation, This includes a numerical approximation of a…
This paper considers an empirical risk minimization problem under heavy-tailed settings, where data does not have finite variance, but only has $p$-th moment with $p \in (1,2)$. Instead of using estimation procedure based on truncated…
Posterior distributions often feature intractable normalizing constants, called marginal likelihoods or evidence, that are useful for model comparison via Bayes factors. This has motivated a number of methods for estimating ratios of…
The expected value of partial perfect information (EVPPI) denotes the value of eliminating uncertainty on a subset of unknown parameters involved in a decision model. The EVPPI can be regarded as a decision-theoretic sensitivity index, and…
A weighted Gaussian approximation to tail product-limit process for Pareto-like distributions of randomly right-truncated data is provided and a new consistent and asymptotically normal estimator of the extreme value index is derived. A…
We consider selecting the top-$m$ alternatives from a finite number of alternatives via Monte Carlo simulation. Under a Bayesian framework, we formulate the sampling decision as a stochastic dynamic programming problem, and develop a…
Parametric stochastic simulators are ubiquitous in science, often featuring high-dimensional input parameters and/or an intractable likelihood. Performing Bayesian parameter inference in this context can be challenging. We present a neural…
Estimating nested expectations is an important task in computational mathematics and statistics. In this paper we propose a new Monte Carlo method using post-stratification to estimate nested expectations efficiently without taking samples…
Adaptive Monte Carlo methods are recent variance reduction techniques. In this work, we propose a mathematical setting which greatly relaxes the assumptions needed by for the adaptive importance sampling techniques presented by Vazquez-Abad…
In Monte Carlo simulations, proposed configurations are accepted or rejected according to an acceptance ratio, which depends on an underlying probability distribution and an a priori sampling probability. By carefully selecting the…
This paper introduces a new version of the smoothly trimmed mean with a more general version of weights, which can be used as an alternative to the classical trimmed mean. We derive its asymptotic variance and to further investigate its…