Related papers: Efficient Importance Sampling for Large Sums of In…
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…
In this work, we evaluate the outage probability (OP) for L-branch equal gain combining (EGC) diversity receivers operating over fading channels, i.e. equivalently the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the sum of the L channel…
Adaptive importance sampling (AIS) algorithms are a rising methodology in signal processing, statistics, and machine learning. An effective adaptation of the proposals is key for the success of AIS. Recent works have shown that gradient…
Importance sampling has become an indispensable strategy to speed up optimization algorithms for large-scale applications. Improved adaptive variants - using importance values defined by the complete gradient information which changes…
Random geometric graphs defined on Euclidean subspaces, also called Gilbert graphs, are widely used to model spatially embedded networks across various domains. In such graphs, nodes are located at random in Euclidean space, and any two…
We study two adaptive importance sampling schemes for estimating the probability of a rare event in the high-dimensional regime $d \to \infty$ with $d$ the dimension. The first scheme is the prominent cross-entropy (CE) method, and the…
In this work, we propose a class of importance sampling (IS) estimators for estimating the right tail probability of a sum of continuous random variables based on a change of variables to $L^1$ polar coordinates in which the radial and…
Variational Inference (VI) is a popular alternative to asymptotically exact sampling in Bayesian inference. Its main workhorse is optimization over a reverse Kullback-Leibler divergence (RKL), which typically underestimates the tail of the…
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…
Importance sampling (IS) and numerical integration methods are usually employed for approximating moments of complicated target distributions. In its basic procedure, the IS methodology randomly draws samples from a proposal distribution…
In this paper we study rare events associated to solutions of elliptic partial differential equations with spatially varying random coefficients. The random coefficients follow the lognormal distribution, which is determined by a Gaussian…
A new method called "variational sampling" is proposed to estimate integrals under probability distributions that can be evaluated up to a normalizing constant. The key idea is to fit the target distribution with an exponential family model…
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…
This work presents a novel gradient-free importance sampling-based framework for precisely and efficiently estimating rare event probabilities, often encountered in reliability analyses of engineering systems. The approach is formulated…
Importance sampling is a technique that is commonly used to speed up Monte Carlo simulation of rare events. However, little is known regarding the design of efficient importance sampling algorithms in the context of queueing networks. The…
Sampling is an important tool for estimating large, complex sums and integrals over high dimensional spaces. For instance, important sampling has been used as an alternative to exact methods for inference in belief networks. Ideally, we…
Statistical model checking avoids the exponential growth of states associated with probabilistic model checking by estimating properties from multiple executions of a system and by giving results within confidence bounds. Rare properties…
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…
A parametric method similar to autoregressive spectral estimators is proposed to determine the probability density function (pdf) of a random set. The method proceeds by maximizing the likelihood of the pdf, yielding estimates that perform…
Exploiting stochastic path integral theory, we obtain \emph{by simulation} substantial gains in efficiency for the computation of reaction rates in one-dimensional, bistable, overdamped stochastic systems. Using a well-defined measure of…