Related papers: Quasi-Monte Carlo and importance sampling methods …
Variational Inference (VI) is a popular alternative to asymptotically exact sampling in Bayesian inference. Its main workhorse is optimization over a reverse Kullback-Leibler divergence (RKL), which typically underestimates the tail of the…
Stochastic PDE eigenvalue problems are useful models for quantifying the uncertainty in several applications from the physical sciences and engineering, e.g., structural vibration analysis, the criticality of a nuclear reactor or photonic…
We consider the problem of simulating loss probabilities and conditional excesses for linear asset portfolios under the t-copula model. Although in the literature on market risk management there are papers proposing efficient variance…
In this paper, we extend our analysis of lattice systems using the wavelet transform to systems for which exact enumeration is impractical. For such systems, we illustrate a wavelet-accelerated Monte Carlo (WAMC) algorithm, which…
Monte Carlo (MC) and Quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) methods are classical approaches for the numerical integration of functions $f$ over $[0,1]^d$. While QMC methods can achieve faster convergence rates than MC in moderate dimensions, their…
High-throughput characterization often requires estimating parameters and model dimension from experimental data of limited quantity and quality. Such data may result in an ill-posed inverse problem, where multiple sets of parameters and…
Statistical signal processing applications usually require the estimation of some parameters of interest given a set of observed data. These estimates are typically obtained either by solving a multi-variate optimization problem, as in the…
This work addresses the estimation of rare-event quantities expressed as expectations of smooth observables of solutions to a broad class of McKean--Vlasov stochastic differential equations (MV-SDEs). Building on the double loop Monte Carlo…
This paper investigates Monte Carlo (MC) methods to estimate probabilities of rare events associated with solutions to the $d$-dimensional McKean-Vlasov stochastic differential equation (MV-SDE). MV-SDEs are usually approximated using a…
Markov chain Monte Carlo methods are a powerful and commonly used family of numerical methods for sampling from complex probability distributions. As applications of these methods increase in size and complexity, the need for efficient…
We study quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) integration of smooth functions defined over the multi-dimensional unit cube. Inspired by a recent work of Pan and Owen, we study a new construction-free median QMC rule which can exploit the smoothness and…
A key limitation of sampling algorithms for approximate inference is that it is difficult to quantify their approximation error. Widely used sampling schemes, such as sequential importance sampling with resampling and Metropolis-Hastings,…
In this paper we propose a technique to reduce the number of function evaluations, which is often the bottleneck of the black-box optimization, in the information geometric optimization (IGO) that is a generic framework of the probability…
We introduce a variant of the Hybrid Monte Carlo (HMC) algorithm to address large-deviation statistics in stochastic hydrodynamics. Based on the path-integral approach to stochastic (partial) differential equations, our HMC algorithm…
The Effective Sample Size (ESS) and Integrated Autocorrelation Time (IACT) are two popular criteria for comparing Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms and detecting their convergence. Our goal is to assess those two quantities in the…
We describe a simple Importance Sampling strategy for Monte Carlo simulations based on a least squares optimization procedure. With several numerical examples, we show that such Least Squares Importance Sampling (LSIS) provides efficiency…
A core problem in statistics and probabilistic machine learning is to compute probability distributions and expectations. This is the fundamental problem of Bayesian statistics and machine learning, which frames all inference as…
In this paper, we propose a new stochastic optimization algorithm for Bayesian inference based on multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) methods. In Bayesian statistics, biased estimators of the model evidence have been often used as stochastic…
Latent Gaussian models (LGMs) are a popular class of Bayesian hierarchical models that include Gaussian processes, as well as certain spatial models and mixed-effect models. Efficient Bayesian inference of LGMs often requires marginalizing…
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…