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Automated Vehicle (AV) validation based on simulated testing requires unbiased evaluation and high efficiency. One effective solution is to increase the exposure to risky rare events while reweighting the probability measure. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-25 Yichun Ye , He Zhang , Ye Tian , Jian Sun , Karl Meinke

Sequential importance sampling algorithms have been defined to estimate likelihoods in models of ancestral population processes. However, these algorithms are based on features of the models with constant population size, and become…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2016-03-24 Coralie Merle , Raphaël Leblois , François Rousset , Pierre Pudlo

Estimating failure probability is a key task in the field of uncertainty quantification. In this domain, importance sampling has proven to be an effective estimation strategy; however, its efficiency heavily depends on the choice of the…

Computation · Statistics 2025-04-01 Nuojin Cheng , Alireza Doostan

We consider the problem of off-policy evaluation in Markov decision processes. Off-policy evaluation is the task of evaluating the expected return of one policy with data generated by a different, behavior policy. Importance sampling is a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-13 Josiah P. Hanna , Scott Niekum , Peter Stone

We consider the problem of choosing design parameters to minimize the probability of an undesired rare event that is described through the average of $n$ iid random variables. Since the probability of interest for near optimal design…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-02-22 Amarjit Budhiraja , Shu Lu , Yang Yu , Quoc Tran-Dinh

Adaptive Monte Carlo schemes developed over the last years usually seek to ensure ergodicity of the sampling process in line with MCMC tradition. This poses constraints on what is possible in terms of adaptation. In the general case…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-07-22 Ingmar Schuster

The basic idea of importance sampling is to use independent samples from a proposal measure in order to approximate expectations with respect to a target measure. It is key to understand how many samples are required in order to guarantee…

Computation · Statistics 2017-01-17 S. Agapiou , O. Papaspiliopoulos , D. Sanz-Alonso , A. M. Stuart

Reliable estimation of feature contributions in machine learning models is essential for trust, transparency and regulatory compliance, especially when models are proprietary or otherwise operate as black boxes. While permutation-based…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-24 Albert Dorador

In this paper, we introduce a new algorithm for rare event estimation based on adaptive importance sampling. We consider a smoothed version of the optimal importance sampling density, which is approximated by an ensemble of interacting…

Computation · Statistics 2023-04-19 Konstantin Althaus , Iason Papaioannou , Elisabeth Ullmann

Feature importance scores are ubiquitous tools for understanding the predictions of machine learning models. However, many popular attribution methods suffer from high instability due to random sampling. Leveraging novel ideas from…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-08 Jeremy Goldwasser , Giles Hooker

The paper analyzes the scalability of multiobjective estimation of distribution algorithms (MOEDAs) on a class of boundedly-difficult additively-separable multiobjective optimization problems. The paper illustrates that even if the linkage…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Kumara Sastry , Martin Pelikan , David E. Goldberg

In computational mechanics, multiple models are often present to describe a physical system. While Bayesian model selection is a helpful tool to compare these models using measurement data, it requires the computationally expensive…

Computation · Statistics 2025-04-14 Subhayan De , Reza Farzad , Patrick T. Brewick , Erik A. Johnson , Steven F. Wojtkiewicz

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

This paper improves upon existing data pruning methods for image classification by introducing a novel pruning metric and pruning procedure based on importance sampling. The proposed pruning metric explicitly accounts for data separability,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-09-24 Steven Grosz , Rui Zhao , Rajeev Ranjan , Hongcheng Wang , Manoj Aggarwal , Gerard Medioni , Anil Jain

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-11-19 Scott A. Cameron , Hans C. Eggers , Steve Kroon

We develop a new algorithm for the estimation of rare event probabilities associated with the steady-state of a Markov stochastic process with continuous state space $\mathbb R^d$ and discrete time steps (i.e. a discrete-time $\mathbb…

Probability · Mathematics 2019-04-09 Krzysztof Bisewski , Daan Crommelin , Michel Mandjes

Importance sampling with data-driven proposal distributions is widely used in practice. A common workflow first generates an auxiliary sample of size $N$ from an approximation of the target distribution, constructs a density estimate $\hat…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-05-20 Cathrine Aeckerle-Willems , Ilja Klebanov , Simon Weissmann

Monte Carlo methods represent the "de facto" standard for approximating complicated integrals involving multidimensional target distributions. In order to generate random realizations from the target distribution, Monte Carlo techniques use…

Computation · Statistics 2022-01-21 L. Martino , V. Elvira , D. Luengo , J. Corander

Inference for partially observed Markov process models has been a longstanding methodological challenge with many scientific and engineering applications. Iterated filtering algorithms maximize the likelihood function for partially observed…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2012-11-26 Edward L. Ionides , Anindya Bhadra , Yves Atchadé , Aaron King

Dynamic Fault Trees (DFT) are widely adopted in industry to assess the dependability of safety-critical equipment. Since many systems are too large to be studied numerically, DFTs dependability is often analysed using Monte Carlo…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2019-10-29 Carlos E. Budde , Marco Biagi , Raúl E. Monti , Pedro R. D'Argenio , Mariëlle Stoelinga