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Related papers: Gradient-based Adaptive Importance Samplers

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Probabilistic graphical models are powerful tools which allow us to formalise our knowledge about the world and reason about its inherent uncertainty. There exist a considerable number of methods for performing inference in probabilistic…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-11-13 Robert Walecki , Albert Buchard , Kostis Gourgoulias , Chris Hart , Maria Lomeli , A. K. W. Navarro , Max Zwiessele , Yura Perov , Saurabh Johri

Adaptive importance sampling (AIS) methods provide a useful alternative to Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms for performing inference of intractable distributions. Population Monte Carlo (PMC) algorithms constitute a family of AIS…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-12-13 Soumyasundar Pal , Antonios Valkanas , Mark Coates

We explore efficient estimation of statistical quantities, particularly rare event probabilities, for stochastic reaction networks. Consequently, we propose an importance sampling (IS) approach to improve the Monte Carlo (MC) estimator…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2024-03-12 Chiheb Ben Hammouda , Nadhir Ben Rached , Raúl Tempone , Sophia Wiechert

Gaussian Process Latent Variable Models (GPLVMs) have become increasingly popular for unsupervised tasks such as dimensionality reduction and missing data recovery due to their flexibility and non-linear nature. An importance-weighted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Jian Xu , Shian Du , Junmei Yang , Qianli Ma , Delu Zeng , John Paisley

Recent progress has been made with Adaptive Multiple Importance Sampling (AMIS) methods that show improvement in effective sample size. However, consistency for the AMIS estimator has only been established in very restricted cases.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-03-22 Sep Thijssen , H. J. Kappen

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-04-20 Vivekananda Roy , Evangelos Evangelou

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…

Computation · Statistics 2021-03-22 Matti Vihola , Jouni Helske , Jordan Franks

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2007-12-11 Heng Lian

This paper investigates the use of stratified sampling as a variance reduction technique for approximating integrals over large dimensional spaces. The accuracy of this method critically depends on the choice of the space partition, the…

Probability · Mathematics 2009-09-15 Pierre Etoré , Gersende Fort , Benjamin Jourdain , Eric Moulines

We discuss estimating the probability that the sum of nonnegative independent and identically distributed random variables falls below a given threshold, i.e., $\mathbb{P}(\sum_{i=1}^{N}{X_i} \leq \gamma)$, via importance sampling (IS). We…

Computation · Statistics 2021-10-04 Nadhir Ben Rached , Abdul-Lateef Haji-Ali , Gerardo Rubino , Raul Tempone

The Integrated Nested Laplace Approximation (INLA) is a deterministic approach to Bayesian inference on latent Gaussian models (LGMs) and focuses on fast and accurate approximation of posterior marginals for the parameters in the models.…

Computation · Statistics 2021-03-05 Martin Outzen Berild , Sara Martino , Virgilio Gómez-Rubio , Håvard Rue

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…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2022-10-27 Eya Ben Amar , Nadhir Ben Rached , Abdul-Lateef Haji-Ali , Raúl Tempone

In this paper, we aim to compute numerical approximation integral by using an adaptive Monte Carlo algorithm. We propose a stratified sampling algorithm based on an iterative method which splits the strata following some quantities called…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2015-07-22 Toni Sayah

In applications of Gaussian processes where quantification of uncertainty is a strict requirement, it is necessary to accurately characterize the posterior distribution over Gaussian process covariance parameters. Normally, this is done by…

Computation · Statistics 2016-04-01 Xiaoyu Xiong , Václav Šmídl , Maurizio Filippone

Learning energy-based models (EBMs) is known to be difficult especially on discrete data where gradient-based learning strategies cannot be applied directly. Although ratio matching is a sound method to learn discrete EBMs, it suffers from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-28 Meng Liu , Haoran Liu , Shuiwang Ji

We consider the sample efficient estimation of failure probabilities from expensive oracle evaluations of a limit state function via importance sampling (IS). In contrast to conventional ``two stage'' approaches, which first train a…

Computation · Statistics 2026-04-10 Ashwin Renganathan , Annie S. Booth

Based on the algorithm Informed Importance Tempering (IIT) proposed by Li et al. (2023) we propose an algorithm that uses an adaptive bounded balancing function. We argue why implementing parallel tempering where each replica uses a…

Model fitting is possibly the most extended problem in science. Classical approaches include the use of least-squares fitting procedures and maximum likelihood methods to estimate the value of the parameters in the model. However, in recent…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2022-04-12 J. Lopez-Santiago , L. Martino , J. Miguez , M. A. Vazquez

The basic idea of importance sampling is to use independent samples from a proposal measure in order to approximate expectations with respect to a target measure. It is key to understand how many samples are required in order to guarantee…

Computation · Statistics 2017-01-17 S. Agapiou , O. Papaspiliopoulos , D. Sanz-Alonso , A. M. Stuart

Estimating rare events in complex systems is a key challenge in reliability analysis. The challenge grows in multimodal problems, where traditional methods often rely on a small set of design points and risk overlooking critical failure…

Computation · Statistics 2025-08-04 Sara Helal , Victor Elvira