Related papers: Selection of proposal distributions for multiple i…
Slice sampling is a well-established Markov chain Monte Carlo method for (approximate) sampling of target distributions which are only known up to a normalizing constant. The method is based on choosing a new state on a slice, i.e., a…
Nonparametric mixture models based on the Pitman-Yor process represent a flexible tool for density estimation and clustering. Natural generalization of the popular class of Dirichlet process mixture models, they allow for more robust…
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,…
Inverse Probability Weighting (IPW) is widely used in empirical work in economics and other disciplines. As Gaussian approximations perform poorly in the presence of "small denominators," trimming is routinely employed as a regularization…
In this paper, we consider the problem of numerical investigation of the counting statistics for a class of one-dimensional systems. Importance sampling, the cornerstone technique usually implemented for such problems, critically hinges on…
The Integrated Nested Laplace Approximation (INLA) is a deterministic approach to Bayesian inference on latent Gaussian models (LGMs) and focuses on fast and accurate approximation of posterior marginals for the parameters in the models.…
Importance sampling (IS) is a common reweighting strategy for off-policy prediction in reinforcement learning. While it is consistent and unbiased, it can result in high variance updates to the weights for the value function. In this work,…
MCMC methods (Monte Carlo Markov Chain) are a class of methods used to perform simulations per a probability distribution $P$. These methods are often used when we have difficulties to directly sample per a given probability distribution…
Ratios of normalizing constants for two distributions are needed in both Bayesian statistics, where they are used to compare models, and in statistical physics, where they correspond to differences in free energy. Two approaches have long…
In applications of Gaussian processes where quantification of uncertainty is a strict requirement, it is necessary to accurately characterize the posterior distribution over Gaussian process covariance parameters. Normally, this is done by…
We propose bandit importance sampling (BIS), a powerful importance sampling framework tailored for settings in which evaluating the target density is computationally expensive. BIS facilitates accurate sampling while minimizing the required…
Importance sampling has been known as a powerful tool to reduce the variance of Monte Carlo estimator for rare event simulation. Based on the criterion of minimizing the variance of Monte Carlo estimator within a parametric family, we…
This paper investigates asymptotically optimal importance sampling (IS) schemes for pricing European call options under the Heston stochastic volatility model. We focus on two distinct rare-event regimes where standard Monte Carlo methods…
The inverse probability weighting (IPW) method is used to handle attrition in association analyses derived from cohort studies. It consists in weighting the respondents at a given follow-up by their inverse probability to participate.…
We study and compare three estimators of a discrete monotone distribution: (a) the (raw) empirical estimator; (b) the "method of rearrangements" estimator; and (c) the maximum likelihood estimator. We show that the maximum likelihood…
This paper compares three approaches to the problem of selecting among probability models to fit data (1) use of statistical criteria such as Akaike's information criterion and Schwarz's "Bayesian information criterion," (2) maximization of…
Reinforcement learning can learn amortised design policies for designing sequences of experiments. However, current amortised methods rely on estimators of expected information gain (EIG) that require an exponential number of samples on the…
The likelihood-informed subspace (LIS) method offers a viable route to reducing the dimensionality of high-dimensional probability distributions arising in Bayesian inference. LIS identifies an intrinsic low-dimensional linear subspace…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods sample from unnormalized probability distributions and offer guarantees of exact sampling. However, in the continuous case, unfavorable geometry of the target distribution can greatly limit 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…