Related papers: A weight-bounded importance sampling method for va…
Off-policy policy estimators that use importance sampling (IS) can suffer from high variance in long-horizon domains, and there has been particular excitement over new IS methods that leverage the structure of Markov decision processes. We…
Importance sampling is a rare event simulation technique used in Monte Carlo simulations to bias the sampling distribution towards the rare event of interest. By assigning appropriate weights to sampled points, importance sampling allows…
We consider the efficient use of an approximation within Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), with subsequent importance sampling (IS) correction of the Markov chain inexact output, leading to asymptotically exact inference. We detail…
We establish an ordering criterion for the asymptotic variances of two consistent Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) estimators: an importance sampling (IS) estimator, based on an approximate reversible chain and subsequent IS weighting, and a…
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,…
Bayesian methods and their implementations by means of sophisticated Monte Carlo techniques have become very popular in signal processing over the last years. Importance Sampling (IS) is a well-known Monte Carlo technique that approximates…
We consider importance sampling (IS) type weighted estimators based on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) targeting an approximate marginal of the target distribution. In the context of Bayesian latent variable models, the MCMC typically…
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…
For complex latent variable models, the likelihood function is not available in closed form. In this context, a popular method to perform parameter estimation is Importance Weighted Variational Inference. It essentially maximizes the…
Importance sampling (IS) as an elegant and efficient variance reduction (VR) technique for the acceleration of stochastic optimization problems has attracted many researches recently. Unlike commonly adopted stochastic uniform sampling in…
Importance Sampling (IS), an effective variance reduction strategy in Monte Carlo (MC) simulation, is frequently utilized for Bayesian inference and other statistical challenges. Quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) replaces the random samples in MC…
Importance sampling is a well developed method in statistics. Given a random variable $X$, the problem of estimating its expected value $\mu$ is addressed. The standard approach is to use the sample mean as an estimator $\bar x$. In…
This paper considers Importance Sampling (IS) for the estimation of tail risks of a loss defined in terms of a sophisticated object such as a machine learning feature map or a mixed integer linear optimisation formulation. Assuming only…
This paper proposes a new importance sampling (IS) that is tailored to quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) integration over $\mathbb{R}^s$. IS introduces a multiplicative adjustment to the integrand by compensating the sampling from the proposal…
Importance sampling is a common technique for Monte Carlo approximation, including Monte Carlo approximation of p-values. Here it is shown that a simple correction of the usual importance sampling p-values creates valid p-values, meaning…
The inefficiency of using an unbiased estimator in a Monte Carlo procedure can be quantified using an inefficiency constant, equal to the product of the variance of the estimator and its mean computational cost. We develop methods for…
Importance sampling is a widely used technique to reduce the variance of a Monte Carlo estimator by an appropriate change of measure. In this work, we study importance sam- pling in the framework of diffusion process and consider the change…
Multiple importance sampling (MIS) is an increasingly used methodology where several proposal densities are used to approximate integrals, generally involving target probability density functions. The use of several proposals allows for a…
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…
Importance sampling is often used in machine learning when training and testing data come from different distributions. In this paper we propose a new variant of importance sampling that can reduce the variance of importance sampling-based…