Related papers: Towards Adaptive Self-Normalized Importance Sample…
Estimating the expectations of functionals applied to sums of random variables (RVs) is a well-known problem encountered in many challenging applications. Generally, closed-form expressions of these quantities are out of reach. A naive…
Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithms were originally designed for estimating intractable conditional expectations within state-space models, but are now routinely used to generate approximate samples in the context of general-purpose…
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…
Probabilistic models based on Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) imply the evaluation of normalized Boltzmann factors, which in turn require from the evaluation of the partition function Z. The exact evaluation of Z, though, becomes a…
Many high-energy-physics (HEP) simulations for the LHC rely on Monte Carlo using importance sampling by means of the VEGAS algorithm. However, complex high-precision calculations have become a challenge for the standard toolbox, as this…
Probabilistic models in physics often require from the evaluation of normalized Boltzmann factors, which in turn implies the computation of the partition function Z. Getting the exact value of Z, though, becomes a forbiddingly expensive…
We propose nested sequential Monte Carlo (NSMC), a methodology to sample from sequences of probability distributions, even where the random variables are high-dimensional. NSMC generalises the SMC framework by requiring only approximate,…
The performance of the Monte Carlo sampling methods relies on the crucial choice of a proposal density. The notion of optimality is fundamental to design suitable adaptive procedures of the proposal density within Monte Carlo schemes. This…
Task-adapted compressed sensing magnetic resonance imaging (CS-MRI) is emerging to address the specific demands of downstream clinical tasks with significantly fewer k-space measurements than required by Nyquist sampling. However, existing…
Annealed importance sampling (AIS) and related algorithms are highly effective tools for marginal likelihood estimation, but are not fully differentiable due to the use of Metropolis-Hastings correction steps. Differentiability is a…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are a powerful tool for computation with complex probability distributions. However the performance of such methods is critically dependant on properly tuned parameters, most of which are difficult if…
In this paper, we address the challenge of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms within the approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) framework, which often get trapped in local optima due to their inherent local exploration mechanism. We…
Importance sampling and independent Metropolis-Hastings (IMH) are among the fundamental building blocks of Monte Carlo methods. Both require a proposal distribution that globally approximates the target distribution. The Radon-Nikodym…
We consider estimating the marginal likelihood in settings with independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) data. We propose estimating the predictive distributions in a sequential factorization of the marginal likelihood in such…
Importance Sampling (IS), an effective variance reduction strategy in Monte Carlo (MC) simulation, is frequently utilized for Bayesian inference and other statistical challenges. Quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) replaces the random samples in MC…
We study robust high-dimensional sparse regression under finite-variance heavy-tailed noise, epsilon-contamination, and alpha-mixing dependence via two subsampling estimators: Adaptive Importance Sampling (AIS) and Stratified Sub-sampling…
Medical Image Segmentation (MIS) plays a crucial role in medical therapy planning and robot navigation. Prototype learning methods in MIS focus on generating segmentation masks through pixel-to-prototype comparison. However, current…
Many Monte Carlo (MC) and importance sampling (IS) methods use mixture models (MMs) for their simplicity and ability to capture multimodal distributions. Recently, subtractive mixture models (SMMs), i.e. MMs with negative coefficients, have…
Importance sampling is a popular variance reduction method for Monte Carlo estimation, where a notorious question is how to design good proposal distributions. While in most cases optimal (zero-variance) estimators are theoretically…
Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods represent a classical set of techniques to simulate a sequence of probability measures through a simple selection/mutation mechanism. However, the associated selection functions and mutation kernels…