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This work presents a novel gradient-free importance sampling-based framework for precisely and efficiently estimating rare event probabilities, often encountered in reliability analyses of engineering systems. The approach is formulated…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-01-30 Elsayed Eshra , Konstantinos G. Papakonstantinou

In this paper, we consider a class of continuous-time, continuous-space stochastic optimal control problems. Building upon recent advances in Markov chain approximation methods and sampling-based algorithms for deterministic path planning,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2012-02-27 Vu Anh Huynh , Sertac Karaman , Emilio Frazzoli

This paper deals with the estimation of rare event probabilities using importance sampling (IS), where an optimal proposal distribution is computed with the cross-entropy (CE) method. Although, IS optimized with the CE method leads to an…

Computation · Statistics 2020-02-05 Patrick Héas

Importance Sampling (IS) is a method for approximating expectations under a target distribution using independent samples from a proposal distribution and the associated importance weights. In many applications, the target distribution is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-09-14 Gabriel Cardoso , Sergey Samsonov , Achille Thin , Eric Moulines , Jimmy Olsson

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a powerful tool for sampling from complex probability distributions. Despite its versatility, MCMC often suffers from strong autocorrelation and the negative sign problem, leading to slowing down the…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2024-12-05 Synge Todo

Monte Carlo estimation in plays a crucial role in stochastic reaction networks. However, reducing the statistical uncertainty of the corresponding estimators requires sampling a large number of trajectories. We propose control variates…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-10-19 Michael Backenköhler , Luca Bortolussi , Verena Wolf

This paper deals with the Monte-Carlo methods for evaluating expectations of functionals of solutions to McKean-Vlasov Stochastic Differential Equations (MV-SDE) with drifts of super-linear growth. We assume that the MV-SDE is approximated…

Probability · Mathematics 2018-10-15 Goncalo dos Reis , Greig Smith , Peter Tankov

In this paper, we introduce a new algorithm for rare event estimation based on adaptive importance sampling. We consider a smoothed version of the optimal importance sampling density, which is approximated by an ensemble of interacting…

Computation · Statistics 2023-04-19 Konstantin Althaus , Iason Papaioannou , Elisabeth Ullmann

Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) provide a promising framework for modeling predictive uncertainty and enhancing out-of-distribution robustness (OOD) by estimating the posterior distribution of network parameters. Stochastic Gradient Markov…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Hyunsu Kim , Giung Nam , Chulhee Yun , Hongseok Yang , Juho Lee

Importance sampling (IS) is a powerful Monte Carlo (MC) methodology for approximating integrals, for instance in the context of Bayesian inference. In IS, the samples are simulated from the so-called proposal distribution, and the choice of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-29 Ali Mousavi , Reza Monsefi , Víctor Elvira

We consider the problem of estimating parameter sensitivity for Markovian models of reaction networks. Sensitivity values measure the responsiveness of an output to the model parameters. They help in analyzing the network, understanding its…

Probability · Mathematics 2014-04-18 Ankit Gupta , Mustafa Khammash

Exploiting stochastic path integral theory, we obtain \emph{by simulation} substantial gains in efficiency for the computation of reaction rates in one-dimensional, bistable, overdamped stochastic systems. Using a well-defined measure of…

Computational Physics · Physics 2016-09-08 Daniel M. Zuckerman , Thomas B. Woolf

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

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

We propose a novel Markov chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC) method for reverse engineering the topological structure of stochastic reaction networks, a notoriously challenging problem that is relevant in many modern areas of research, like…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-10-08 Daniel F. Linder , Grzegorz A. Rempala

Importance sampling (IS) as an elegant and efficient variance reduction (VR) technique for the acceleration of stochastic optimization problems has attracted many researches recently. Unlike commonly adopted stochastic uniform sampling in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-02 Fei Wang , Xiaofeng Gao , Guihai Chen , Jun Ye

Atomistic simulations provide valuable insights into the physical processes governing material behavior. However, their applicability is fundamentally constrained by the limited time scales accessible to brute-force simulations. This…

Computational Physics · Physics 2026-02-16 Michael Kim , Wei Cai

Sampling rare events in metastable dynamical systems is often a computationally expensive task and one needs to resort to enhanced sampling methods such as importance sampling. Since we can formulate the problem of finding optimal…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-10-05 Enric Ribera Borrell , Jannes Quer , Lorenz Richter , Christof Schütte

This work puts forward a novel numerical approach for solving the stochastic optimal control problem (SOCP) and the mean field control (MFC) problem using projection algorithm inspired by the stochastic maximum principle (SMP) which is also…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-09 Hui Sun

We study a family of distributed stochastic optimization algorithms where gradients are sampled by a token traversing a network of agents in random-walk fashion. Typically, these random-walks are chosen to be Markov chains that…

Probability · Mathematics 2024-01-19 Jie Hu , Vishwaraj Doshi , Do Young Eun