Related papers: Unbiased simulation of rare events in continuous t…
We consider the problem of approximating the product of $n$ expectations with respect to a common probability distribution $\mu$. Such products routinely arise in statistics as values of the likelihood in latent variable models. Motivated…
This paper introduces a framework for simulating finite dimensional representations of (jump) diffusion sample paths over finite intervals, without discretisation error (exactly), in such a way that the sample path can be restored at any…
We explore past and recent developments in rare-event probability estimation with a particular focus on a novel Monte Carlo technique Empirical Likelihood Maximization (ELM). This is a versatile method that involves sampling from a sequence…
The contribution of this paper is to introduce change of measure based techniques for the rare-event analysis of heavy-tailed stochastic processes. Our changes-of-measure are parameterized by a family of distributions admitting a mixture…
We explore whether splitting and killing methods can improve the accuracy of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) estimates of rare event probabilities, and we make three contributions. First, we prove that "weighted ensemble" is the only…
Mass violence, almost no matter how defined, is (thankfully) rare. Rare events are very difficult to study in a systematic manner. Standard statistical procedures can fail badly and usefully accurate forecasts of rare events often are…
For statistics of rare events in systems obeying a large-deviation principle, the rate function is a key quantity. When numerically estimating the rate function one is always restricted to finite system sizes. Thus, if the interest is in…
Computing the return times of extreme events and assessing the impact of climate change on such return times is fundamental to extreme event attribution studies. However, the rarity of such events in the observational record makes this task…
Estimating the probability of failures or accidents with aerospace systems is often necessary when new concepts or designs are introduced, as it is being done for Autonomous Aircraft. If the design is safe, as it is supposed to be, accident…
We introduce a simple method for nearly simultaneous computation of all moments needed for quasi maximum likelihood estimation of parameters in discretely observed stochastic differential equations commonly seen in finance. The method…
Consider a multidimensional diffusion process $X=\{X\left(t\right) :t\in\lbrack0,1]\}$. Let $\varepsilon>0$ be a \textit{deterministic}, user defined, tolerance error parameter. Under standard regularity conditions on the drift and…
Branching processes are a class of continuous-time Markov chains (CTMCs) with ubiquitous applications. A general difficulty in statistical inference under partially observed CTMC models arises in computing transition probabilities when the…
Importance sampling has been known as a powerful tool to reduce the variance of Monte Carlo estimator for rare event simulation. Based on the criterion of minimizing the variance of Monte Carlo estimator within a parametric family, we…
This paper proposes a novel distributed optimization framework that addresses time-varying optimization problems without requiring explicit derivative information of the objective functions. Traditional distributed methods often rely on…
Improving Importance Sampling estimators for rare event probabilities requires sharp approximations of conditional densities. This is achieved for events E_{n}:=(f(X_{1})+...+f(X_{n}))\inA_{n} where the summands are i.i.d. and E_{n} is a…
Detecting rare events, those defined to give rise to high impact but have a low probability of occurring, is a challenge in a number of domains including meteorological, environmental, financial and economic. The use of machine learning to…
We consider the problem of static Bayesian inference for partially observed Levy-process models. We develop a methodology which allows one to infer static parameters and some states of the process, without a bias from the…
The paper presents a new efficient and robust method for rare event probability estimation for computational models of an engineering product or a process returning categorical information only, for example, either success or failure. For…
Computing the probability of evidence even with known error bounds is NP-hard. In this paper we address this hard problem by settling on an easier problem. We propose an approximation which provides high confidence lower bounds on…
Discrete Markov random fields form a natural class of models to represent images and spatial data sets. The use of such models is, however, hampered by a computationally intractable normalising constant. This makes parameter estimation and…