Related papers: A General Framework for Importance Sampling with M…
Recent work used importance sampling ideas for better variational bounds on likelihoods. We clarify the applicability of these ideas to pure probabilistic inference, by showing the resulting Importance Weighted Variational Inference (IWVI)…
The efficient calculation of rare-event kinetics in complex dynamical systems, such as the rate and pathways of ligand dissociation from a protein, is a generally unsolved problem. Markov state models can systematically integrate ensembles…
Random walks are a fundamental model in applied mathematics and are a common example of a Markov chain. The limiting stationary distribution of the Markov chain represents the fraction of the time spent in each state during the stochastic…
In this work, we propose a smart idea to couple importance sampling and Multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC). We advocate a per level approach with as many importance sampling parameters as the number of levels, which enables us to compute the…
Epidemics are inherently stochastic, and stochastic models provide an appropriate way to describe and analyse such phenomena. Given temporal incidence data consisting of, for example, the number of new infections or removals in a given time…
This paper provides an introductory overview of how one may employ importance sampling effectively as a tool for solving stochastic optimization formulations incorporating tail risk measures such as Conditional Value-at-Risk. Approximating…
This paper introduces a Bayesian framework that combines Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling, dimensionality reduction, and neural density estimation to efficiently handle inverse problems that (i) must be solved multiple times, and…
The inference of Markov models from data on stochastic dynamical trajectories over the large time-window $T$ is revisited via the Large Deviations at Level 2.5 for the time-empirical density and the time-empirical flows. The goal is to…
We introduce a generalization of the Adaptive Multilevel Splitting algorithm in the discrete time dynamic setting, namely when it is applied to sample rare events associated with paths of Markov chains. By interpreting the algorithm as a…
Monte Carlo methods, Variational Inference, and their combinations play a pivotal role in sampling from intractable probability distributions. However, current studies lack a unified evaluation framework, relying on disparate performance…
Importance sampling has been successfully used to accelerate stochastic optimization in many convex problems. However, the lack of an efficient way to calculate the importance still hinders its application to Deep Learning. In this paper,…
In this note, we consider using a link function that has heavier tails than the usual exponential link function. We construct efficient Gibbs algorithms for Poisson and Multinomial models based on this link function by introducing gamma and…
We propose Subsampling MCMC, a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) framework where the likelihood function for $n$ observations is estimated from a random subset of $m$ observations. We introduce a highly efficient unbiased estimator of the…
We introduce Path-ZVA: an efficient simulation technique for estimating the probability of reaching a rare goal state before a regeneration state in a (discrete-time) Markov chain. Standard Monte Carlo simulation techniques do not work well…
We present an algorithm for finding the probabilities of rare events in nonequilibrium processes. The algorithm consists of evolving the system with a modified dynamics for which the required event occurs more frequently. By keeping track…
Dynamic epidemic models have proven valuable for public health decision makers as they provide useful insights into the understanding and prevention of infectious diseases. However, inference for these types of models can be difficult…
Importance sampling is a central idea underlying off-policy prediction in reinforcement learning. It provides a strategy for re-weighting samples from a distribution to obtain unbiased estimates under another distribution. However,…
An important statistical task in disease mapping problems is to identify divergent regions with unusually high or low risk of disease. Leave-one-out cross-validatory (LOOCV) model assessment is the gold standard for estimating predictive…
Importance sampling is a widely used technique to reduce the variance of a Monte Carlo estimator by an appropriate change of measure. In this work, we study importance sam- pling in the framework of diffusion process and consider the change…
Complex systems made of interacting elements are commonly abstracted as networks, in which nodes are associated with dynamic state variables, whose evolution is driven by interactions mediated by the edges. Markov processes have been the…