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Related papers: Multicalibrated Partitions for Importance Weights

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Importance sampling is a Monte Carlo method which designs estimators of expectations under a target distribution using weighted samples from a proposal distribution. When the target distribution is complex, such as multimodal distributions…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-04 Anas Cherradi , Yazid Janati , Alain Durmus , Sylvain Le Corff , Yohan Petetin , Julien Stoehr

Propensity score methods are widely used for estimating treatment effects from observational studies. A popular approach is to estimate propensity scores by maximum likelihood based on logistic regression, and then apply inverse probability…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-10-24 Zhiqiang Tan

Mixture distributions are extensively used as a modeling tool in diverse areas from machine learning to communications engineering to physics, and obtaining bounds on the entropy of probability distributions is of fundamental importance in…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2022-12-05 James Melbourne , Saurav Talukdar , Shreyas Bhaban , Mokshay Madiman , Murti V. Salapaka

Probabilistic predictions can be evaluated through comparisons with observed label frequencies, that is, through the lens of calibration. Recent scholarship on algorithmic fairness has started to look at a growing variety of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-16 Benedikt Höltgen , Robert C Williamson

The marginal likelihood is a central tool for drawing Bayesian inference about the number of components in mixture models. It is often approximated since the exact form is unavailable. A bias in the approximation may be due to an incomplete…

Computation · Statistics 2014-11-14 Jeong Eun Lee , Christian P. Robert

This paper studies the expected $L_p$-discrepancy ($2 \leq p < \infty$) for stratified sampling schemes under importance sampling. We introduce a parametric family of equivolume partitions $\Omega_{\theta,\sim}$ and leverage recent exact…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-01-09 Xiaoda Xu

Importance weighting is a standard tool for correcting distribution shift, but its statistical behavior under target shift -- where the label distribution changes between training and testing while the conditional distribution of inputs…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-04 Davit Gogolashvili

A distribution shift between the training and test data can severely harm performance of machine learning models. Importance weighting addresses this issue by assigning different weights to data points during training. We argue that…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-17 Floris Holstege , Bram Wouters , Noud van Giersbergen , Cees Diks

A sequential importance sampling algorithm is developed for the distribution that results when a matrix of independent, but not identically distributed, Bernoulli random variables is conditioned on a given sequence of row and column sums.…

Computation · Statistics 2013-01-18 Matthew T. Harrison , Jeffrey W. Miller

Importance weighting is a general way to adjust Monte Carlo integration to account for draws from the wrong distribution, but the resulting estimate can be highly variable when the importance ratios have a heavy right tail. This routinely…

Computation · Statistics 2024-04-12 Aki Vehtari , Daniel Simpson , Andrew Gelman , Yuling Yao , Jonah Gabry

Importance sampling is a Monte Carlo technique for efficiently estimating the likelihood of rare events by biasing the sampling distribution towards the rare event of interest. By drawing weighted samples from a learned proposal…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-20 Liam A. Kruse , Marc R. Schlichting , Mykel J. Kochenderfer

We consider a generalization of the discrete-time Self Healing Umbrella Sampling method, which is an adaptive importance technique useful to sample multimodal target distributions. The importance function is based on the weights (namely the…

Probability · Mathematics 2017-09-04 Gersende Fort , Benjamin Jourdain , Tony Lelièvre , Gabriel Stoltz

Machine learning-based decision support systems are increasingly deployed in clinical settings, where probabilistic scoring functions are used to inform and prioritize patient management decisions. However, widely used scoring rules, such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Gerardo A. Flores , Alyssa H. Smith , Julia A. Fukuyama , Ashia C. Wilson

Approximate inference in probability models is a fundamental task in machine learning. Approximate inference provides powerful tools to Bayesian reasoning, decision making, and Bayesian deep learning. The main goal is to estimate the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-10 Jun Han

When facing uncertainty, decision-makers want predictions they can trust. A machine learning provider can convey confidence to decision-makers by guaranteeing their predictions are distribution calibrated -- amongst the inputs that receive…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-07-14 Shengjia Zhao , Michael P. Kim , Roshni Sahoo , Tengyu Ma , Stefano Ermon

Majorization theory is a powerful mathematical tool to compare the disorder in distributions, with wide-ranging applications in many fields including mathematics, physics, information theory, and economics. While majorization theory…

A weighted likelihood technique for robust estimation of a multivariate Wrapped Normal distribution for data points scattered on a p-dimensional torus is proposed. The occurrence of outliers in the sample at hand can badly compromise…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-07-01 Giovanni Saraceno , Claudio Agostinelli , Luca Greco

Importance Sampling methods are broadly used to approximate posterior distributions or some of their moments. In its standard approach, samples are drawn from a single proposal distribution and weighted properly. However, since the…

Computation · Statistics 2019-11-05 Víctor Elvira , Luca Martino , David Luengo , Mónica F. Bugallo

Discrepancies play an important role in the study of uniformity properties of point sets. Their probability distributions are a help in the analysis of the efficiency of the Quasi Monte Carlo method of numerical integration, which uses…

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology · Physics 2007-05-23 A. F. W. van Hameren

Weighting estimators based on propensity scores are widely used for causal estimation in a variety of contexts, such as observational studies, marginal structural models and interference. They enjoy appealing theoretical properties such as…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-10-06 Linbo Wang , Yuexia Zhang , Thomas S. Richardson , Xiao-Hua Zhou