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The effective sample size (ESS) is widely used in sample-based simulation methods for assessing the quality of a Monte Carlo approximation of a given distribution and of related integrals. In this paper, we revisit the approximation of the…

Computation · Statistics 2022-04-14 Víctor Elvira , Luca Martino , Christian P. Robert

Many Bayesian inference problems involve high-dimensional models where the performance of standard importance sampling (IS) methods often degrades rapidly as the dimensionality increases. Classical analyses of IS typically rely on the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-05-29 Fabián González , Víctor Elvira , Joaquín Míguez

Importance sampling (IS) is a powerful Monte Carlo (MC) technique for approximating intractable integrals, for instance in Bayesian inference. The performance of IS relies heavily on the appropriate choice of the so-called proposal…

Computation · Statistics 2024-12-30 Ali Mousavi , Víctor Elvira

The self-normalized importance sampling (SNIS) estimator is a Monte Carlo estimator widely used to approximate expectations in statistical signal processing and machine learning. The efficiency of SNIS depends on the choice of proposal, but…

Computation · Statistics 2025-05-06 Nicola Branchini , Víctor Elvira

The sampling importance resampling method is widely utilized in various fields, such as numerical integration and statistical simulation. In this paper, two modified methods are presented by incorporating two variance reduction techniques…

Computation · Statistics 2024-08-28 Yao Xiao , Kang Fu , Kun Li

Importance sampling (IS) is an efficient stand-in for model refitting in performing (LOO) cross-validation (CV) on a Bayesian model. IS inverts the Bayesian update for a single observation by reweighting posterior samples. The so-called…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-26 Joshua C Chang , Xiangting Li , Tianyi Su , Shixin Xu , Hao-Ren Yao , Julia Porcino , Carson Chow

It is often the case in Statistics that one needs to compute sums of infinite series, especially in marginalising over discrete latent variables. This has become more relevant with the popularization of gradient-based techniques (e.g.…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-03-11 Luiz Max Carvalho , Wellington J. Silva , Guido A. Moreira

Importance sampling is a technique that is commonly used to speed up Monte Carlo simulation of rare events. However, little is known regarding the design of efficient importance sampling algorithms in the context of queueing networks. The…

Probability · Mathematics 2009-09-29 Paul Dupuis , Ali Devin Sezer , Hui Wang

The aim of this paper is to introduce a new Monte Carlo method based on importance sampling techniques for the simulation of stochastic differential equations. The main idea is to combine random walk on squares or rectangles methods with…

Probability · Mathematics 2010-10-22 Madalina Deaconu , Antoine Lejay

Influence maximization (IM) is the problem of finding for a given $s\geq 1$ a set $S$ of $|S|=s$ nodes in a network with maximum influence. With stochastic diffusion models, the influence of a set $S$ of seed nodes is defined as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-30 Gal Sadeh , Edith Cohen , Haim Kaplan

Importance sampling approximates expectations with respect to a target measure by using samples from a proposal measure. The performance of the method over large classes of test functions depends heavily on the closeness between both…

Computation · Statistics 2016-09-01 Daniel Sanz-Alonso

Large deviation theory has provided important clues for the choice of importance sampling measures for Monte Carlo evaluation of exceedance probabilities. However, Glasserman and Wang [Ann. Appl. Probab. 7 (1997) 731--746] have given…

Probability · Mathematics 2007-05-23 Hock Peng Chan , Tze Leung Lai

We consider Bayesian inference by importance sampling when the likelihood is analytically intractable but can be unbiasedly estimated. We refer to this procedure as importance sampling squared (IS2), as we can often estimate the likelihood…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-07-26 Minh-Ngoc Tran , Marcel Scharth , Michael K. Pitt , Robert Kohn

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 a variance reduction technique for efficient estimation of rare-event probabilities by Monte Carlo. In standard importance sampling schemes, the system is simulated using an a priori fixed change of measure suggested…

Probability · Mathematics 2007-05-23 Paul Dupuis , Hui Wang

Growing scale of recommender systems require extensive tuning to respond to market dynamics and system changes. We address the challenge of tuning a large-scale ads recommendation platform with multiple continuous parameters influencing key…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Kaushal Paneri , Michael Munje , Kailash Singh Maurya , Adith Swaminathan , Yifan Shi

Multiple importance sampling (MIS) is an increasingly used methodology where several proposal densities are used to approximate integrals, generally involving target probability density functions. The use of several proposals allows for a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-07-12 Rahul Mukerjee , Víctor Elvira

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

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-07-01 Ghassen Jerfel , Serena Wang , Clara Fannjiang , Katherine A. Heller , Yian Ma , Michael I. Jordan

Acceptance-rejection (AR), Independent Metropolis Hastings (IMH) or importance sampling (IS) Monte Carlo (MC) simulation algorithms all involve computing ratios of probability density functions (pdfs). On the other hand, classifiers…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-09-11 Elouan Argouarc'h , François Desbouvries