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Monte Carlo sampling methods are the standard procedure for approximating complicated integrals of multidimensional posterior distributions in Bayesian inference. In this work, we focus on the class of Layered Adaptive Importance Sampling…

Computation · Statistics 2022-07-08 F. Llorente , E. Curbelo , L. Martino , V. Elvira , D. Delgado

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,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-28 Kristopher De Asis , Eric Graves , Richard S. Sutton

This paper is concerned with Bayesian inference when the likelihood is analytically intractable but can be unbiasedly estimated. We propose an annealed importance sampling procedure for estimating expectations with respect to the posterior.…

Methodology · Statistics 2014-02-26 M. -N. Tran , C. Strickland , M. K. Pitt , R. Kohn

In inverse problems, the parameters of a model are estimated based on observations of the model response. The Bayesian approach is powerful for solving such problems; one formulates a prior distribution for the parameter state that is…

Computation · Statistics 2022-06-08 Max Ehre , Rafael Flock , Martin Fußeder , Iason Papaioannou , Daniel Straub

Importance sampling (IS) is valuable in reducing the variance of Monte Carlo sampling for many areas, including finance, rare event simulation, and Bayesian inference. It is natural and obvious to combine quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) methods…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2022-07-21 Zhijian He , Zhan Zheng , Xiaoqun Wang

We propose an importance sampling (IS)-based transport map Hamiltonian Monte Carlo procedure for performing full Bayesian analysis in general nonlinear high-dimensional hierarchical models. Using IS techniques to construct a transport map,…

Computation · Statistics 2019-12-11 Kjartan Kloster Osmundsen , Tore Selland Kleppe , Roman Liesenfeld

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-30 Antoine Blanchard , Themistoklis Sapsis

We propose an adaptive importance sampling scheme for Gaussian approximations of intractable posteriors. Optimization-based approximations like variational inference can be too inaccurate while existing Monte Carlo methods can be too slow.…

Computation · Statistics 2025-02-04 Willem van den Boom , Andrea Cremaschi , Alexandre H. Thiery

The importance weighted autoencoder (IWAE) (Burda et al., 2016) is a popular variational-inference method which achieves a tighter evidence bound (and hence a lower bias) than standard variational autoencoders by optimising a multi-sample…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-09-20 Axel Finke , Alexandre H. Thiery

Increased access to computing resources has led to the development of algorithms that can run efficiently on multi-core processing units or in distributed computing environments. In the context of Bayesian inference, many parallel computing…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-09-11 Daniel Würzler Barreto , Mevin B. Hooten

Importance sampling (IS) is a variance reduction method for simulating rare events. A recent paper by Dupuis, Wang and Sezer (Ann. App. Probab. 17(4):1306- 1346, 2007) exploits connections between IS and stochastic games and optimal control…

Probability · Mathematics 2008-12-24 Ali Devin Sezer

Bayesian analysis plays a crucial role in estimating distribution of unknown parameters for given data and model. Due to the curse of dimensionality, it becomes difficult for high-dimensional problems, especially when multiple modes exist.…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-07-18 Zihan Liao , Binbin Li , Hua-Ping Wan

The study further explores randomized QMC (RQMC), which maintains the QMC convergence rate and facilitates computational efficiency analysis. Emphasis is laid on integrating randomly shifted lattice rules, a distinct RQMC quadrature, with…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2023-09-21 Zhan Zheng , Hejin Wang , Xiaoqun Wang

A learned generative model often produces biased statistics relative to the underlying data distribution. A standard technique to correct this bias is importance sampling, where samples from the model are weighted by the likelihood ratio…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-11-05 Aditya Grover , Jiaming Song , Alekh Agarwal , Kenneth Tran , Ashish Kapoor , Eric Horvitz , Stefano Ermon

We consider the sample efficient estimation of failure probabilities from expensive oracle evaluations of a limit state function via importance sampling (IS). In contrast to conventional ``two stage'' approaches, which first train a…

Computation · Statistics 2026-04-10 Ashwin Renganathan , Annie S. Booth

An importance weight quantifies the relative importance of one example over another, coming up in applications of boosting, asymmetric classification costs, reductions, and active learning. The standard approach for dealing with importance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-06-21 Nikos Karampatziakis , John Langford

We consider importance sampling (IS) type weighted estimators based on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) targeting an approximate marginal of the target distribution. In the context of Bayesian latent variable models, the MCMC typically…

Computation · Statistics 2021-03-22 Matti Vihola , Jouni Helske , Jordan Franks

Importance sampling (IS) and numerical integration methods are usually employed for approximating moments of complicated target distributions. In its basic procedure, the IS methodology randomly draws samples from a proposal distribution…

Computation · Statistics 2022-04-12 Víctor Elvira , Luca Martino , Pau Closas

Importance sampling is a widely used technique to estimate properties of a distribution. This paper investigates trading-off some bias for variance by adaptively winsorizing the importance sampling estimator. The novel winsorizing…

Computation · Statistics 2021-02-10 Paulo Orenstein

Adaptive importance sampling (AIS) algorithms are a rising methodology in signal processing, statistics, and machine learning. An effective adaptation of the proposals is key for the success of AIS. Recent works have shown that gradient…

Computation · Statistics 2025-03-27 Víctor Elvira , Émilie Chouzenoux , O. Deniz Akyildiz