Related papers: Error Bounds for Importance Sampling with Estimate…
Importance sampling is a widely used technique to reduce the variance of a Monte Carlo estimator by an appropriate change of measure. In this work, we study importance sam- pling in the framework of diffusion process and consider the change…
We derive concentration inequalities for the supremum norm of the difference between a kernel density estimator (KDE) and its point-wise expectation that hold uniformly over the selection of the bandwidth and under weaker conditions on the…
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…
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…
Driven by several successful applications such as in stochastic gradient descent or in Bayesian computation, control variates have become a major tool for Monte Carlo integration. However, standard methods do not allow the distribution of…
Importance sampling is a well developed method in statistics. Given a random variable $X$, the problem of estimating its expected value $\mu$ is addressed. The standard approach is to use the sample mean as an estimator $\bar x$. In…
For complex latent variable models, the likelihood function is not available in closed form. In this context, a popular method to perform parameter estimation is Importance Weighted Variational Inference. It essentially maximizes the…
We introduce overdispersed black-box variational inference, a method to reduce the variance of the Monte Carlo estimator of the gradient in black-box variational inference. Instead of taking samples from the variational distribution, we use…
Implicit sampling is a weighted sampling method that is used in data assimilation, where one sequentially updates estimates of the state of a stochastic model based on a stream of noisy or incomplete data. Here we describe how to use…
Among Monte Carlo techniques, the importance sampling requires fine tuning of a proposal distribution, which is now fluently resolved through iterative schemes. The Adaptive Multiple Importance Sampling (AMIS) of Cornuet et al. (2012)…
Mutual information (MI) is a fundamental quantity in information theory and machine learning. However, direct estimation of MI is intractable, even if the true joint probability density for the variables of interest is known, as it involves…
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…
We apply the sample average approximation (SAA) method to risk-neutral optimization problems governed by nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs) with random inputs. We analyze the consistency of the SAA optimal values and SAA…
Importance sampling (IS) is a Monte Carlo methodology that allows for approximation of a target distribution using weighted samples generated from another proposal distribution. Adaptive importance sampling (AIS) implements an iterative…
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…
To efficiently evaluate system reliability based on Monte Carlo simulation, importance sampling is used widely. The optimal importance sampling density was derived in 1950s for the deterministic simulation model, which maps an input to an…
Score based approaches to sampling have shown much success as a generative algorithm to produce new samples from a target density given a pool of initial samples. In this work, we consider if we have no initial samples from the target…
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…
The Bayesian estimation of the unknown parameters of state-space (dynamical) systems has received considerable attention over the past decade, with a handful of powerful algorithms being introduced. In this paper we tackle the theoretical…
Monte Carlo techniques, including MCMC and other methods, are widely used in Bayesian inference to generate sets of samples from a parameter space of interest. The Python GetDist package provides tools for analysing these samples and…