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Many Bayesian inference problems involve high dimensional models for which only a subset of the model variables are of actual interest. All other variables are just nuisance parameters that one would ideally like to integrate out…

Computation · Statistics 2025-08-13 Fabián González , Víctor Elvira , Joaquín Miguez

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-14 Yunshi Huang , Emilie Chouzenoux , Victor Elvira , Jean-Christophe Pesquet

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

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-11 Liviu Aolaritei , Bart P. G. Van Parys , Henry Lam , Michael I. Jordan

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2011-06-02 J. Cheng , M. J. Druzdzel

Importance sampling is used to approximate Bayes' rule in many computational approaches to Bayesian inverse problems, data assimilation and machine learning. This paper reviews and further investigates the required sample size for…

Computation · Statistics 2021-02-03 Daniel Sanz-Alonso , Zijian Wang

Importance sampling (IS) is a widely used simulation method for estimating rare event probabilities. In IS, the relative variance of an estimator is the most common measure of estimator accuracy, and the focus of existing literature is on…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-01-05 Julie Choi , Peter Glynn

Adaptive importance sampling is a widely spread Monte Carlo technique that uses a re-weighting strategy to iteratively estimate the so-called target distribution. A major drawback of adaptive importance sampling is the large variance of the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-11-01 Anna Korba , François Portier

Importance sampling (IS) is a Monte Carlo technique that relies on weighted samples, simulated from a proposal distribution, to estimate intractable integrals. The quality of the estimators improves with the number of samples. However, for…

Computation · Statistics 2022-07-18 Medha Agarwal , Dootika Vats , Víctor Elvira

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…

Applications · Statistics 2023-04-24 Longhai Li , Cindy X. Feng , Shi Qiu

The marginal likelihood is a central tool for drawing Bayesian inference about the number of components in mixture models. It is often approximated since the exact form is unavailable. A bias in the approximation may be due to an incomplete…

Computation · Statistics 2014-11-14 Jeong Eun Lee , Christian P. Robert

Reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models (LLMs) is dominated by the cost of rollout generation, which has motivated the use of low-precision rollouts (e.g., FP8) paired with a BF16 trainer to improve throughput and reduce…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-15 Jiajun Zhou , Wei Shao , Lingchao Zheng , Yuwei Fan , Ngai Wong

Importance sampling (IS) is a technique that enables statistical estimation of output performance at multiple input distributions from a single nominal input distribution. IS is commonly used in Monte Carlo simulation for variance reduction…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-05-07 Yijuan Liang , Guangxin Jiang , Michael C. Fu

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

We establish an ordering criterion for the asymptotic variances of two consistent Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) estimators: an importance sampling (IS) estimator, based on an approximate reversible chain and subsequent IS weighting, and a…

Computation · Statistics 2020-07-06 Jordan Franks , Matti Vihola

Importance sampling (IS) is an important technique to reduce the estimation variance in Monte Carlo simulations. In many practical problems, however, the use of IS method may result in unbounded variance, and thus fail to provide reliable…

Computation · Statistics 2019-02-26 Tengchao Yu , Linjun Lu , Jinglai Li

Efficiently sampling from high-dimensional, multi-modal posteriors is a central challenge in Bayesian inference for astrophysics, especially gravitational-wave astronomy. Popular families of methods like Markov-chain Monte Carlo, nested…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2026-03-26 Miaoxin Liu , Alvin J. K. Chua

We propose a novel adaptive importance sampling algorithm which incorporates Stein variational gradient decent algorithm (SVGD) with importance sampling (IS). Our algorithm leverages the nonparametric transforms in SVGD to iteratively…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-07-26 Jun Han , Qiang Liu

Bayesian methods and their implementations by means of sophisticated Monte Carlo techniques have become very popular in signal processing over the last years. Importance Sampling (IS) is a well-known Monte Carlo technique that approximates…

Computation · Statistics 2022-01-21 L. Martino , V. Elvira , G. Camps-Valls