Related papers: BR-SNIS: Bias Reduced Self-Normalized Importance S…
We study predictive probability inference in classification tasks using random forests under class imbalance. We focus on two simplified variants of Breiman's algorithm, namely subsampling Infinite Random Forests (IRFs) and under-sampling…
Importance sampling-based estimators for off-policy evaluation (OPE) are valued for their simplicity, unbiasedness, and reliance on relatively few assumptions. However, the variance of these estimators is often high, especially when…
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…
In rare-event simulation, an importance sampling (IS) estimator is regarded as efficient if its relative error, namely the ratio between its standard deviation and mean, is sufficiently controlled. It is widely known that when a rare-event…
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…
Annealed Importance Sampling (AIS) is a popular algorithm used to estimates the intractable marginal likelihood of deep generative models. Although AIS is guaranteed to provide unbiased estimate for any set of hyperparameters, the common…
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…
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…
Monte Carlo methods represent the "de facto" standard for approximating complicated integrals involving multidimensional target distributions. In order to generate random realizations from the target distribution, Monte Carlo techniques use…
We study variance reduction for score estimation and diffusion-based sampling in settings where the clean (target) score is available or can be approximated. Starting from the Target Score Identity (TSI), which expresses the noisy marginal…
We consider statistical learning problems, when the distribution $P'$ of the training observations $Z'_1,\; \ldots,\; Z'_n$ differs from the distribution $P$ involved in the risk one seeks to minimize (referred to as the test distribution)…
Among Monte Carlo techniques, the importance sampling requires fine tuning of a proposal distribution, which is now fluently resolved through iterative schemes. The Adaptive Multiple Importance Sampling (AMIS) of Cornuet et al. (2012)…
Considering the increasing size of available data, the need for statistical methods that control the finite sample bias is growing. This is mainly due to the frequent settings where the number of variables is large and allowed to increase…
Reliability updating refers to a problem that integrates Bayesian updating technique with structural reliability analysis and cannot be directly solved by structural reliability methods (SRMs) when it involves equality information. The…
Ranked set sampling (RSS) is a stratified sampling method that improves efficiency over simple random sampling (SRS) by utilizing auxiliary information for ranking and stratification. While balanced RSS (BRSS) assumes equal allocation…
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…
The bias of an estimator is defined as the difference of its expected value from the parameter to be estimated, where the expectation is with respect to the model. Loosely speaking, small bias reflects the desire that if an experiment is…
Importance sampling is widely used in machine learning and statistics, but its power is limited by the restriction of using simple proposals for which the importance weights can be tractably calculated. We address this problem by studying…
Probabilistic models based on Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) imply the evaluation of normalized Boltzmann factors, which in turn require from the evaluation of the partition function Z. The exact evaluation of Z, though, becomes a…
This paper introduces Adaptive Mixture Importance Sampling (AMIS) as a novel approach for optimizing key performance indicators (KPIs) in large-scale recommender systems, such as online ad auctions. Traditional importance sampling (IS)…