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Transition path sampling is a method for estimating the rates of rare events in molecular systems based on the gradual transformation of a path distribution containing a small fraction of reactive trajectories into a biased distribution in…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2015-10-28 Pierre Terrier , Mihai-Cosmin Marinica , Manuel Athènes

Bayesian inverse problems use observed data to update a prior probability distribution for an unknown state or parameter of a scientific system to a posterior distribution conditioned on the data. In many applications, the unknown parameter…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-05-12 Josie König , Elizabeth Qian , Melina A. Freitag

We propose a class of strongly efficient rare event simulation estimators for random walks and compound Poisson processes with a regularly varying increment/jump-size distribution in a general large deviations regime. Our estimator is based…

Probability · Mathematics 2017-06-14 Bohan Chen , Jose Blanchet , Chang-Han Rhee , Bert Zwart

Article describes the results of the development and using of Rare-Event Monte-Carlo Simulation Algorithms for Dynamic Fault Trees Estimation. For Fault Trees estimation usually analytical methods are used (Minimal Cut sets, Markov Chains,…

Applications · Statistics 2016-01-28 Sergey Porotsky

In many applications, Bayesian inverse problems can give rise to probability distributions which contain complexities due to the Hessian varying greatly across parameter space. This complexity often manifests itself as lower dimensional…

Computation · Statistics 2020-07-28 Simon L. Cotter , Ioannis G. Kevrekidis , Paul Russell

Rare events are events that are expected to occur infrequently, or more technically, those that have low probabilities (say, order of $10^{-3}$ or less) of occurring according to a probability model. In the context of uncertainty…

Computation · Statistics 2015-08-21 James L. Beck , Konstantin M. Zuev

Conventional information-theoretic quantities assume access to probability distributions. Estimating such distributions is not trivial. Here, we consider function-based formulations of cross entropy that sidesteps this a priori estimation…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2021-09-27 Isaac J. Sledge , Jose C. Principe

Improving Importance Sampling estimators for rare event probabilities requires sharp approx- imations of the optimal density leading to a nearly zero-variance estimator. This paper presents a new way to handle the estimation of the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2014-01-15 Virgile Caron

This paper proposes niching importance sampling, a framework that combines concepts from reliability analysis, e.g. Markov chains, importance sampling, and relative cross entropy minimisation, with niching techniques from evolutionary…

Computation · Statistics 2026-04-09 Hugh J. Kinnear , F. A. DiazDelaO

In Bayesian inverse problems, the posterior distribution is used to quantify uncertainty about the reconstructed solution. In practice, Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms often are used to draw samples from the posterior distribution.…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2018-03-13 D. Andrew Brown , Arvind Saibaba , Sarah Vallélian

We consider systems of stochastic differential equations with multiple scales and small noise and assume that the coefficients of the equations are ergodic and stationary random fields. Our goal is to construct provably-efficient importance…

Probability · Mathematics 2015-09-29 Konstantinos Spiliopoulos

Probability density function estimation with weighted samples is the main foundation of all adaptive importance sampling algorithms. Classically, a target distribution is approximated either by a non-parametric model or within a parametric…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-16 Julien Demange-Chryst , François Bachoc , Jérôme Morio , Timothé Krauth

The study considers the usage of a probabilistic optimization method called Cross-Entropy (CE). This is the version of the Monte Carlo method created by Reuven Rubinstein (1997). It was developed in the context of determining rare events.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-04-15 Maria Katarzyna Stachowiak , Krzysztof Józef Szajowski

Trajectory optimizers for model-based reinforcement learning, such as the Cross-Entropy Method (CEM), can yield compelling results even in high-dimensional control tasks and sparse-reward environments. However, their sampling inefficiency…

The objective of this work is to quantify the uncertainty in probability of failure estimates resulting from incomplete knowledge of the probability distributions for the input random variables. We propose a framework that couples the…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-10-26 Dimitris G. Giovanis , Michael Shields

$\textbf{Motivation:}$ Small $p$-values are often required to be accurately estimated in large-scale genomic studies for the adjustment of multiple hypothesis tests and the ranking of genomic features based on their statistical…

Applications · Statistics 2023-08-29 Yang Shi , Mengqiao Wang , Weiping Shi , Ji-Hyun Lee , Huining Kang , Hui Jiang

In calculating expected information gain in optimal Bayesian experimental design, the computation of the inner loop in the classical double-loop Monte Carlo requires a large number of samples and suffers from underflow if the number of…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2018-04-04 Joakim Beck , Ben Mansour Dia , Luis FR Espath , Quan Long , Raul Tempone

We consider the problem of efficient simulation estimation of the density function at the tails, and the probability of large deviations for a sum of independent, identically distributed, light-tailed and non-lattice random vectors. The…

Probability · Mathematics 2017-04-26 Santanu Dey , Sandeep Juneja , Ankush Agarwal

We present an algorithm for finding the probabilities of rare events in nonequilibrium processes. The algorithm consists of evolving the system with a modified dynamics for which the required event occurs more frequently. By keeping track…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2011-04-07 Anupam Kundu , Sanjib Sabhapandit , Abhishek Dhar

We consider importance sampling for estimating the probability that a light-tailed $d$-dimensional random walk exits through one of many disjoint rare-event regions before reaching an anticipated target. This problem arises in sequential…

Probability · Mathematics 2025-09-19 Yanglei Song , Georgios Fellouris