Related papers: A generalized likelihood-weighted optimal sampling…
This work aims at solving the problems with intractable sparsity-inducing norms that are often encountered in various machine learning tasks, such as multi-task learning, subspace clustering, feature selection, robust principal component…
We consider an input-to-response (ItR) system characterized by (1) parameterized input with a known probability distribution and (2) stochastic ItR function with heteroscedastic randomness. Our purpose is to efficiently quantify the extreme…
In Bayesian optimization, accounting for the importance of the output relative to the input is a crucial yet challenging exercise, as it can considerably improve the final result but often involves inaccurate and cumbersome entropy…
We investigate the issue of parameter estimation with nonuniform negative sampling for imbalanced data. We first prove that, with imbalanced data, the available information about unknown parameters is only tied to the relatively small…
Importance sampling has been known as a powerful tool to reduce the variance of Monte Carlo estimator for rare event simulation. Based on the criterion of minimizing the variance of Monte Carlo estimator within a parametric family, we…
The acquisition function, a critical component in Bayesian optimization (BO), can often be written as the expectation of a utility function under a surrogate model. However, to ensure that acquisition functions are tractable to optimize,…
We consider the problem of choosing design parameters to minimize the probability of an undesired rare event that is described through the average of $n$ iid random variables. Since the probability of interest for near optimal design…
Rare-event simulation techniques, such as importance sampling (IS), constitute powerful tools to speed up challenging estimation of rare catastrophic events. These techniques often leverage the knowledge and analysis on underlying system…
Sampling is a popular method for approximate inference when exact inference is impractical. Generally, sampling algorithms do not exploit context-specific independence (CSI) properties of probability distributions. We introduce…
We introduce a new sufficient statistic for the population parameter vector by allowing for the sampling design to first be selected at random amongst a set of candidate sampling designs. In contrast to the traditional approach in survey…
We describe a new approach to the rare-event Monte Carlo sampling problem. This technique utilizes a symmetrization strategy to create probability distributions that are more highly connected and thus more easily sampled than their…
Improving Importance Sampling estimators for rare event probabilities requires sharp approx- imations of the optimal density leading to a nearly zero-variance estimator. This paper presents a new way to handle the estimation of the…
While large-scale robot datasets have propelled recent progress in imitation learning, learning from smaller task specific datasets remains critical for deployment in new environments and unseen tasks. One such approach to few-shot…
Deep neural networks, when optimized with sufficient data, provide accurate representations of high-dimensional functions; in contrast, function approximation techniques that have predominated in scientific computing do not scale well with…
Importance Sampling (IS) is a widely used variance reduction technique for enhancing the efficiency of Monte Carlo methods, particularly in rare-event simulation and related applications. Despite its effectiveness, the performance of IS is…
Importance sampling is a well developed method in statistics. Given a random variable $X$, the problem of estimating its expected value $\mu$ is addressed. The standard approach is to use the sample mean as an estimator $\bar x$. In…
The paper analyzes theoretically and empirically the performance of likelihood weighting (LW) on a subset of nodes in Bayesian networks. The proposed scheme requires fewer samples to converge due to reduction in sampling variance. The…
Extracting maximal information from experimental data requires access to the likelihood function, which however is never directly available for complex experiments like those performed at high energy colliders. Theoretical predictions are…
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…
We propose a class of strongly efficient rare event simulation estimators for random walks and compound Poisson processes with a regularly varying increment/jump-size distribution in a general large deviations regime. Our estimator is based…