Related papers: Advances in Importance Sampling
Importance sampling is a popular method for efficient computation of various properties of a distribution such as probabilities, expectations, quantiles etc. The output of an importance sampling algorithm can be represented as a weighted…
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…
This paper introduces Tree-Pyramidal Adaptive Importance Sampling (TP-AIS), a novel iterated sampling method that outperforms state-of-the-art approaches like deterministic mixture population Monte Carlo (DM-PMC), mixture population Monte…
Estimating the expectations of functionals applied to sums of random variables (RVs) is a well-known problem encountered in many challenging applications. Generally, closed-form expressions of these quantities are out of reach. A naive…
Stochastic sampling algorithms, while an attractive alternative to exact algorithms in very large Bayesian network models, have been observed to perform poorly in evidential reasoning with extremely unlikely evidence. To address this…
Improving efficiency of importance sampler is at the center of research in Monte Carlo methods. While adaptive approach is usually difficult within the Markov Chain Monte Carlo framework, the counterpart in importance sampling can be…
Importance sampling (IS) represents a fundamental technique for a large surge of off-policy reinforcement learning approaches. Policy gradient (PG) methods, in particular, significantly benefit from IS, enabling the effective reuse of…
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…
Importance sampling (IS) as an elegant and efficient variance reduction (VR) technique for the acceleration of stochastic optimization problems has attracted many researches recently. Unlike commonly adopted stochastic uniform sampling in…
Importance sampling (IS) is commonly used for cross validation (CV) in Bayesian models, because it only involves reweighting existing posterior draws without needing to re-estimate the model by re-running Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC).…
Importance sampling is a well developed method in statistics. Given a random variable $X$, the problem of estimating its expected value $\mu$ is addressed. The standard approach is to use the sample mean as an estimator $\bar x$. In…
This work proposes a novel method through which local information about the target density can be used to construct an efficient importance sampler. The backbone of the proposed method is the Incremental Mixture Importance Sampling (IMIS)…
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…
In Bayesian statistics, many problems can be expressed as the evaluation of the expectation of a quantity of interest with respect to the posterior distribution. Standard Monte Carlo method is often not applicable because the encountered…
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 consider the efficient use of an approximation within Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), with subsequent importance sampling (IS) correction of the Markov chain inexact output, leading to asymptotically exact inference. We detail…
The Effective Sample Size (ESS) is an important measure of efficiency of Monte Carlo methods such as Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and Importance Sampling (IS) techniques. In the IS context, an approximation $\widehat{ESS}$ of the…
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…
Estimating the probability that a sum of random variables (RVs) exceeds a given threshold is a well-known challenging problem. Closed-form expression of the sum distribution is usually intractable and presents an open problem. A crude Monte…
Variational inference approximates the posterior distribution of a probabilistic model with a parameterized density by maximizing a lower bound for the model evidence. Modern solutions fit a flexible approximation with stochastic gradient…