Related papers: Adaptive Annealed Importance Sampling with Constan…
Adaptive importance sampling (AIS) uses past samples to update the \textit{sampling policy} $q_t$ at each stage $t$. Each stage $t$ is formed with two steps : (i) to explore the space with $n_t$ points according to $q_t$ and (ii) to exploit…
Ratios of normalizing constants for two distributions are needed in both Bayesian statistics, where they are used to compare models, and in statistical physics, where they correspond to differences in free energy. Two approaches have long…
In this paper we combine the Alias method with the concept of systematic sampling, a method commonly used in particle filters for efficient low-variance resampling. The proposed method allows very fast sampling from a discrete distribution:…
Simulated annealing - moving from a tractable distribution to a distribution of interest via a sequence of intermediate distributions - has traditionally been used as an inexact method of handling isolated modes in Markov chain samplers.…
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…
Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) have received an increased interest in the last years. In BNNs, a complete posterior distribution of the unknown weight and bias parameters of the network is produced during the training stage. This…
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…
Importance sampling (IS) is a powerful Monte Carlo methodology for the approximation of intractable integrals, very often involving a target probability density function. The performance of IS heavily depends on the appropriate selection of…
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.…
Stochastic sampling algorithms, while an attractive alternative to exact algorithms in very large Bayesian network models, have been observed to perform poorly in evidential reasoning with extremely unlikely evidence. To address this…
Importance sampling (IS) is a Monte Carlo technique for the approximation of intractable distributions and integrals with respect to them. The origin of IS dates from the early 1950s. In the last decades, the rise of the Bayesian paradigm…
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)…
The efficient importance sampling (EIS) method is a general principle for the numerical evaluation of high-dimensional integrals that uses the sequential structure of target integrands to build variance minimising importance samplers.…
Adaptive sampling algorithms are modern and efficient methods that dynamically adjust the sample size throughout the optimization process. However, they may encounter difficulties in risk-averse settings, particularly due to the challenge…
We study robust high-dimensional sparse regression under finite-variance heavy-tailed noise, epsilon-contamination, and alpha-mixing dependence via two subsampling estimators: Adaptive Importance Sampling (AIS) and Stratified Sub-sampling…
Adaptive importance samplers are adaptive Monte Carlo algorithms to estimate expectations with respect to some target distribution which \textit{adapt} themselves to obtain better estimators over a sequence of iterations. Although it is…
The estimation of normalizing constants is a fundamental step in probabilistic model comparison. Sequential Monte Carlo methods may be used for this task and have the advantage of being inherently parallelizable. However, the standard…
We introduce a new class of adaptive importance samplers leveraging adaptive optimisation tools, which we term AdaOAIS. We build on Optimised Adaptive Importance Samplers (OAIS), a class of techniques that adapt proposals to improve the…
We consider estimating the marginal likelihood in settings with independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) data. We propose estimating the predictive distributions in a sequential factorization of the marginal likelihood in such…
We study convergence rates of the annealed importance sampling algorithm (Neal '01) combined with Langevin Monte Carlo when the target is a multimodal Gibbs measure. The main result shows that for a fixed error threshold, the time…