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Related papers: Advances in Importance Sampling

200 papers

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…

Computation · Statistics 2024-12-30 Ali Mousavi , Víctor Elvira

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…

Computation · Statistics 2025-05-06 Nicola Branchini , Víctor Elvira

Adaptive importance sampling (AIS) methods provide a useful alternative to Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms for performing inference of intractable distributions. Population Monte Carlo (PMC) algorithms constitute a family of AIS…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-12-13 Soumyasundar Pal , Antonios Valkanas , Mark Coates

Monte Carlo sampling methods are the standard procedure for approximating complicated integrals of multidimensional posterior distributions in Bayesian inference. In this work, we focus on the class of Layered Adaptive Importance Sampling…

Computation · Statistics 2022-07-08 F. Llorente , E. Curbelo , L. Martino , V. Elvira , D. Delgado

Understanding systems by forward and inverse modeling is a recurrent topic of research in many domains of science and engineering. In this context, Monte Carlo methods have been widely used as powerful tools for numerical inference and…

Computation · Statistics 2022-02-14 F. Llorente , L. Martino , D. Delgado , G. Camps-Valls

The basic idea of importance sampling is to use independent samples from a proposal measure in order to approximate expectations with respect to a target measure. It is key to understand how many samples are required in order to guarantee…

Computation · Statistics 2017-01-17 S. Agapiou , O. Papaspiliopoulos , D. Sanz-Alonso , A. M. Stuart

Sampling from a multimodal distribution is a fundamental and challenging problem in computational science and statistics. Among various approaches proposed for this task, one popular method is Annealed Importance Sampling (AIS). In this…

Computation · Statistics 2024-11-07 Haoxuan Chen , Lexing Ying

Importance Sampling (IS) is a method for approximating expectations under a target distribution using independent samples from a proposal distribution and the associated importance weights. In many applications, the target distribution is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-09-14 Gabriel Cardoso , Sergey Samsonov , Achille Thin , Eric Moulines , Jimmy Olsson

Evaluating expectations on an Ising model (or Boltzmann machine) is essential for various applications, including statistical machine learning. However, in general, the evaluation is computationally difficult because it involves intractable…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-05-19 Muneki Yasuda , Kaiji Sekimoto

Adaptive importance sampling (AIS) methods are increasingly used for the approximation of distributions and related intractable integrals in the context of Bayesian inference. Population Monte Carlo (PMC) algorithms are a subclass of AIS…

Computation · Statistics 2022-06-08 Víctor Elvira , Émilie Chouzenoux

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…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-07-12 Rahul Mukerjee , Víctor Elvira

We propose an importance sampling (IS)-based transport map Hamiltonian Monte Carlo procedure for performing full Bayesian analysis in general nonlinear high-dimensional hierarchical models. Using IS techniques to construct a transport map,…

Computation · Statistics 2019-12-11 Kjartan Kloster Osmundsen , Tore Selland Kleppe , Roman Liesenfeld

Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) have received an increased interest in the last years. In BNNs, a complete posterior distribution of the unknown weight and bias parameters of the network is produced during the training stage. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-14 Yunshi Huang , Emilie Chouzenoux , Victor Elvira , Jean-Christophe Pesquet

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…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-09-19 Zexin Pan , Du Ouyang , Zhijian He

We consider Bayesian inference by importance sampling when the likelihood is analytically intractable but can be unbiasedly estimated. We refer to this procedure as importance sampling squared (IS2), as we can often estimate the likelihood…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-07-26 Minh-Ngoc Tran , Marcel Scharth , Michael K. Pitt , Robert Kohn

Multiple importance sampling (MIS) methods use a set of proposal distributions from which samples are drawn. Each sample is then assigned an importance weight that can be obtained according to different strategies. This work is motivated by…

Computation · Statistics 2015-05-21 Víctor Elvira , Luca Martino , David Luengo , Mónica F. Bugallo

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…

Computation · Statistics 2021-03-22 Matti Vihola , Jouni Helske , Jordan Franks

This article investigates the integration of quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) methods using the Adaptive Multiple Importance Sampling (AMIS). Traditional Importance Sampling (IS) often suffers from poor performance since it heavily relies on the…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-05-14 Jianlong Chen , Jiarui Du , Xiaoqun Wang , Zhijian He

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…

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-26 Joshua C Chang , Xiangting Li , Tianyi Su , Shixin Xu , Hao-Ren Yao , Julia Porcino , Carson Chow