Related papers: Rethinking the Effective Sample Size
The Effective Sample Size (ESS) is an important measure of efficiency of Monte Carlo methods such as Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and Importance Sampling (IS) techniques. In the IS context, an approximation $\widehat{ESS}$ of the…
The effective sample size (ESS) measures the informational value of a probability distribution in terms of an equivalent number of study participants. The ESS plays a crucial role in estimating the Expected Value of Sample Information…
The Effective Sample Size (ESS) and Integrated Autocorrelation Time (IACT) are two popular criteria for comparing Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms and detecting their convergence. Our goal is to assess those two quantities in the…
Importance sampling (IS) is a Monte Carlo technique for the approximation of intractable distributions and integrals with respect to them. The origin of IS dates from the early 1950s. In the last decades, the rise of the Bayesian paradigm…
We introduce a general form of sequential Monte Carlo algorithm defined in terms of a parameterized resampling mechanism. We find that a suitably generalized notion of the Effective Sample Size (ESS), widely used to monitor algorithm…
Determining the sample size of an experiment can be challenging, even more so when incorporating external information via a prior distribution. Such information is increasingly used to reduce the size of the control group in randomized…
Importance sampling (IS) is a Monte Carlo technique that relies on weighted samples, simulated from a proposal distribution, to estimate intractable integrals. The quality of the estimators improves with the number of samples. However, for…
Investing efficiently in future research to improve policy decisions is an important goal. Expected Value of Sample Information (EVSI) can be used to select the specific design and sample size of a proposed study by assessing the benefit of…
We investigate the stability of a Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) method applied to the problem of sampling from a target distribution on $\mathbb{R}^d$ for large $d$. It is well known that using a single importance sampling step one produces…
In this work, we analyze alternative effective sample size (ESS) metrics for importance sampling algorithms, and discuss a possible extended range of applications. We show the relationship between the ESS expressions used in the literature…
Estimating the effective sample size (ESS) of a prior distribution is an age-old yet pivotal challenge, with great implications for clinical trials and various biomedical applications. Although numerous endeavors have been dedicated to this…
Importance sampling (IS) is a widely used simulation method for estimating rare event probabilities. In IS, the relative variance of an estimator is the most common measure of estimator accuracy, and the focus of existing literature is on…
Slice Sampling has emerged as a powerful Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm that adapts to the characteristics of the target distribution with minimal hand-tuning. However, Slice Sampling's performance is highly sensitive to the…
The efficient importance sampling (EIS) method is a general principle for the numerical evaluation of high-dimensional integrals that uses the sequential structure of target integrands to build variance minimising importance samplers.…
Importance sampling (IS) is valuable in reducing the variance of Monte Carlo sampling for many areas, including finance, rare event simulation, and Bayesian inference. It is natural and obvious to combine quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) methods…
To efficiently evaluate system reliability based on Monte Carlo simulation, importance sampling is used widely. The optimal importance sampling density was derived in 1950s for the deterministic simulation model, which maps an input to an…
This paper deals with the Monte-Carlo methods for evaluating expectations of functionals of solutions to McKean-Vlasov Stochastic Differential Equations (MV-SDE) with drifts of super-linear growth. We assume that the MV-SDE is approximated…
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…
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…
Bayesian inference is a popular and widely-used approach to infer phylogenies (evolutionary trees). However, despite decades of widespread application, it remains difficult to judge how well a given Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)…