Related papers: A weight-bounded importance sampling method for va…
The naive importance sampling (IS) estimator generally does not work well in examples involving simultaneous inference on several targets, as the importance weights can take arbitrarily large values, making the estimator highly unstable. In…
Importance sampling and independent Metropolis-Hastings (IMH) are among the fundamental building blocks of Monte Carlo methods. Both require a proposal distribution that globally approximates the target distribution. The Radon-Nikodym…
We consider the off-policy estimation problem of estimating the expected reward of a target policy using samples collected by a different behavior policy. Importance sampling (IS) has been a key technique to derive (nearly) unbiased…
In this article we consider importance sampling (IS) and sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods in the context of 1-dimensional random walks with absorbing barriers. In particular, we develop a very precise variance analysis for several IS…
In rare-event simulation, an importance sampling (IS) estimator is regarded as efficient if its relative error, namely the ratio between its standard deviation and mean, is sufficiently controlled. It is widely known that when a rare-event…
Importance sampling is a widely used technique to estimate properties of a distribution. This paper investigates trading-off some bias for variance by adaptively winsorizing the importance sampling estimator. The novel winsorizing…
The Bayesian estimation of the unknown parameters of state-space (dynamical) systems has received considerable attention over the past decade, with a handful of powerful algorithms being introduced. In this paper we tackle the theoretical…
We consider the problem of estimating rare event probabilities, focusing on systems whose evolution is governed by differential equations with uncertain input parameters. If the system dynamics is expensive to compute, standard sampling…
We describe a simple Importance Sampling strategy for Monte Carlo simulations based on a least squares optimization procedure. With several numerical examples, we show that such Least Squares Importance Sampling (LSIS) provides efficiency…
The study further explores randomized QMC (RQMC), which maintains the QMC convergence rate and facilitates computational efficiency analysis. Emphasis is laid on integrating randomly shifted lattice rules, a distinct RQMC quadrature, with…
In this work, we develop an importance sampling estimator by coupling the reduced-order model and the generative model in a problem setting of uncertainty quantification. The target is to estimate the probability that the quantity of…
This article is devoted to the design of importance sampling method for the Monte Carlo simulation of a linear transport equation. This model is of great importance in the simulation of inertial confinement fusion experiments. Our method is…
We introduce overdispersed black-box variational inference, a method to reduce the variance of the Monte Carlo estimator of the gradient in black-box variational inference. Instead of taking samples from the variational distribution, we use…
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,…
Importance sampling (IS) is a powerful Monte Carlo (MC) technique for approximating intractable integrals, for instance in Bayesian inference. The performance of IS relies heavily on the appropriate choice of the so-called proposal…
Importance sampling (IS) is an efficient stand-in for model refitting in performing (LOO) cross-validation (CV) on a Bayesian model. IS inverts the Bayesian update for a single observation by reweighting posterior samples. The so-called…
The self-normalized importance sampling (SNIS) estimator is a Monte Carlo estimator widely used to approximate expectations in statistical signal processing and machine learning. The efficiency of SNIS depends on the choice of proposal, but…
In solving simulation-based stochastic root-finding or optimization problems that involve rare events, such as in extreme quantile estimation, running crude Monte Carlo can be prohibitively inefficient. To address this issue, importance…
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…
Importance sampling (IS) is a popular technique in off-policy evaluation, which re-weights the return of trajectories in the replay buffer to boost sample efficiency. However, training with IS can be unstable and previous attempts to…