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Growing scale of recommender systems require extensive tuning to respond to market dynamics and system changes. We address the challenge of tuning a large-scale ads recommendation platform with multiple continuous parameters influencing key…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Kaushal Paneri , Michael Munje , Kailash Singh Maurya , Adith Swaminathan , Yifan Shi

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

Importance sampling is often used in machine learning when training and testing data come from different distributions. In this paper we propose a new variant of importance sampling that can reduce the variance of importance sampling-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-11-11 Philip S. Thomas , Emma Brunskill

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-10 Matteo Papini , Giorgio Manganini , Alberto Maria Metelli , Marcello Restelli

A current challenge for many Bayesian analyses is determining when to terminate high-dimensional Markov chain Monte Carlo simulations. To this end, we propose using an automated sequential stopping procedure that terminates the simulation…

Computation · Statistics 2014-03-24 Lei Gong , James M. Flegal

Driven by several successful applications such as in stochastic gradient descent or in Bayesian computation, control variates have become a major tool for Monte Carlo integration. However, standard methods do not allow the distribution of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-06 Rémi Leluc , François Portier , Johan Segers , Aigerim Zhuman

This paper provides an introductory overview of how one may employ importance sampling effectively as a tool for solving stochastic optimization formulations incorporating tail risk measures such as Conditional Value-at-Risk. Approximating…

Risk Management · Quantitative Finance 2023-07-11 Anand Deo , Karthyek Murthy

We introduce a new Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampler called the Markov Interacting Importance Sampler (MIIS). The MIIS sampler uses conditional importance sampling (IS) approximations to jointly sample the current state of the Markov…

Computation · Statistics 2015-06-26 Eduardo F. Mendes , Marcel Scharth , Robert Kohn

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

Acceptance-rejection (AR), Independent Metropolis Hastings (IMH) or importance sampling (IS) Monte Carlo (MC) simulation algorithms all involve computing ratios of probability density functions (pdfs). On the other hand, classifiers…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-09-11 Elouan Argouarc'h , François Desbouvries

The quasi-Monte Carlo method is widely used in computational finance, whose efficiency strongly depends on the smoothness and effective dimension of the integrand. In this work, we investigate the combination of importance sampling and the…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-03-05 Jiaxin Yu , Xiaoqun Wang

Importance sampling is a promising variance reduction technique for Monte Carlo simulation based derivative pricing. Existing importance sampling methods are based on a parametric choice of the proposal. This article proposes an algorithm…

Applications · Statistics 2009-04-14 Jan C. Neddermeyer

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…

Computation · Statistics 2019-04-15 Jordan Franks

A method is presented to tackle the sign problem in the simulations of systems having indefinite or complex-valued measures. In general, this new approach is shown to yield statistical errors smaller than the crude Monte Carlo using…

High Energy Physics - Lattice · Physics 2008-11-26 T D Kieu , C J Griffin

Importance sampling has become an important tool for the computation of tail-based risk measures. Since such quantities are often determined mainly by rare events standard Monte Carlo can be inefficient and importance sampling provides a…

Probability · Mathematics 2013-06-29 Pierre Nyquist

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 investigate in this paper an alternative method to simulation based recursive importance sampling procedure to estimate the optimal change of measure for Monte Carlo simulations. We propose an algorithm which combines (vector and…

Probability · Mathematics 2011-09-20 Noufel Frikha , Abass Sagna

Adaptive Monte Carlo methods are very efficient techniques designed to tune simulation estimators on-line. In this work, we present an alternative to stochastic approximation to tune the optimal change of measure in the context of…

Probability · Mathematics 2009-10-23 Benjamin Jourdain , Jérôme Lelong

Monte Carlo simulations are methods for simulating statistical systems. The aim is to generate a representative ensemble of configurations to access thermodynamical quantities without the need to solve the system analytically or to perform…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2015-06-19 Jean-Charles Walter , Gerard Barkema

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).…

Computation · Statistics 2025-08-12 Geonhee Han , Andrew Gelman