Related papers: Error Bounds for Importance Sampling with Estimate…
Training neural samplers directly from unnormalized densities without access to target distribution samples presents a significant challenge. A critical desideratum in these settings is achieving comprehensive mode coverage, ensuring the…
As the number of samples and dimensionality of optimization problems related to statistics an machine learning explode, block coordinate descent algorithms have gained popularity since they reduce the original problem to several smaller…
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…
This paper addresses the problem of Monte Carlo approximation of posterior probability distributions. In particular, we have considered a recently proposed technique known as population Monte Carlo (PMC), which is based on an iterative…
This paper proposes niching importance sampling, a framework that combines concepts from reliability analysis, e.g. Markov chains, importance sampling, and relative cross entropy minimisation, with niching techniques from evolutionary…
Data-driven risk analysis involves the inference of probability distributions from measured or simulated data. In the case of a highly reliable system, such as the electricity grid, the amount of relevant data is often exceedingly limited,…
Standard confidence intervals employed in applied statistical analysis are usually based on asymptotic approximations. Such approximations can be considerably inaccurate in small and moderate sized samples. We derive accurate confidence…
Computing expected information gain (EIG) from prior to posterior (equivalently, mutual information between candidate observations and model parameters or other quantities of interest) is a fundamental challenge in Bayesian optimal…
This paper proposes a new importance sampling (IS) that is tailored to quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) integration over $\mathbb{R}^s$. IS introduces a multiplicative adjustment to the integrand by compensating the sampling from the proposal…
This report explains, implements and extends the works presented in "Tighter Variational Bounds are Not Necessarily Better" (T Rainforth et al., 2018). We provide theoretical and empirical evidence that increasing the number of importance…
We propose an adaptive importance sampling scheme for Gaussian approximations of intractable posteriors. Optimization-based approximations like variational inference can be too inaccurate while existing Monte Carlo methods can be too slow.…
In multiple importance sampling we combine samples from a finite list of proposal distributions. When those proposal distributions are used to create control variates, it is possible (Owen and Zhou, 2000) to bound the ratio of the resulting…
Importance sampling is a Monte Carlo method that introduces a proposal distribution to sample the space according to the target distribution. Yet calibration of the proposal distribution is essential to achieving efficiency, thus the resort…
An importance sampling approach for sampling copula models is introduced. We propose two algorithms that improve Monte Carlo estimators when the functional of interest depends mainly on the behaviour of the underlying random vector when at…
Adaptive Monte Carlo methods are very efficient techniques designed to tune simulation estimators on-line. In this work, we present an alternative to stochastic approximation to tune the optimal change of measure in the context of…
Digital constellations formed by hexagonal or other non-square two-dimensional lattices are often used in advanced digital communication systems. The integrals required to evaluate the symbol error rate (SER) of these constellations in the…
Computation of extreme quantiles and tail-based risk measures using standard Monte Carlo simulation can be inefficient. A method to speed up computations is provided by importance sampling. We show that importance sampling algorithms,…
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…
Kernel density estimation (KDE) is integral to a range of generative and discriminative tasks in machine learning. Drawing upon tools from the multidimensional calculus of variations, we derive an optimal weight function that reduces bias…
Monte Carlo approximations for random linear elliptic PDE constrained optimization problems are studied. We use empirical process theory to obtain best possible mean convergence rates $O(n^{-\frac{1}{2}})$ for optimal values and solutions,…