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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…

Suppose that a mobile sensor describes a Markovian trajectory in the ambient space. At each time the sensor measures an attribute of interest, e.g., the temperature. Using only the location history of the sensor and the associated…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are employed to sample from a given distribution of interest, whenever either the distribution does not exist in closed form, or, if it does, no efficient method to simulate an independent sample from…

Informed Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have been proposed as scalable solutions to Bayesian posterior computation on high-dimensional discrete state spaces, but theoretical results about their convergence behavior in general…

Acceptance-rejection (AR), Independent Metropolis Hastings (IMH) or importance sampling (IS) Monte Carlo (MC) simulation algorithms all involve computing ratios of probability density functions (pdfs). On the other hand, classifiers…

Many high dimensional optimization problems can be reformulated into a problem of finding theoptimal state path under an equivalent state space model setting. In this article, we present a general emulation strategy for developing a state…

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…

Annealed importance sampling (AIS) and related algorithms are highly effective tools for marginal likelihood estimation, but are not fully differentiable due to the use of Metropolis-Hastings correction steps. Differentiability is a…

Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithms were originally designed for estimating intractable conditional expectations within state-space models, but are now routinely used to generate approximate samples in the context of general-purpose…

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…

This paper concerns the use of sequential Monte Carlo methods (SMC) for smoothing in general state space models. A well-known problem when applying the standard SMC technique in the smoothing mode is that the resampling mechanism introduces…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms have become powerful tools for Bayesian inference. However, they do not scale well to large-data problems. Divide-and-conquer strategies, which split the data into batches and, for each batch, run…

Adaptive Monte Carlo schemes developed over the last years usually seek to ensure ergodicity of the sampling process in line with MCMC tradition. This poses constraints on what is possible in terms of adaptation. In the general case…

In this paper we address the problem of Monte Carlo approximation of posterior probability distributions in stochastic kinetic models (SKMs). SKMs are multivariate Markov jump processes that model the interactions among species in…

In statistical data assimilation (SDA) and supervised machine learning (ML), we wish to transfer information from observations to a model of the processes underlying those observations. For SDA, the model consists of a set of differential…

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,…

A recently introduced Importance Sampling strategy based on a least squares optimization is applied to the Monte Carlo simulation of Libor Market Models. Such Least Squares Importance Sampling (LSIS) allows the automatic optimization of the…

We consider the problem of estimating expectations with respect to a target distribution with an unknown normalizing constant, and where even the unnormalized target needs to be approximated at finite resolution. This setting is ubiquitous…

Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods are widely used to draw samples from intractable target distributions. Particle degeneracy can hinder the use of SMC when the target distribution is highly constrained or multimodal. As a motivating…

Variational inference is a powerful paradigm for approximate Bayesian inference with a number of appealing properties, including support for model learning and data subsampling. By contrast MCMC methods like Hamiltonian Monte Carlo do not…