Related papers: The Wasserstein cost of Importance Sampling
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…
In this paper we introduce Refractor Importance Sampling (RIS), an improvement to reduce error variance in Bayesian network importance sampling propagation under evidential reasoning. We prove the existence of a collection of importance…
The Wasserstein distance $\mathcal{W}_p$ is an important instance of an optimal transport cost. Its numerous mathematical properties as well as applications to various fields such as mathematical finance and statistics have been well…
The inefficiency of using an unbiased estimator in a Monte Carlo procedure can be quantified using an inefficiency constant, equal to the product of the variance of the estimator and its mean computational cost. We develop methods for…
The naive importance sampling (IS) estimator generally does not work well in examples involving simultaneous inference on several targets, as the importance weights can take arbitrarily large values, making the estimator highly unstable. In…
Importance sampling has become an important tool for the computation of tail-based risk measures. Since such quantities are often determined mainly by rare events standard Monte Carlo can be inefficient and importance sampling provides a…
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 the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model of spin glasses at high-temperature and no external field, and study the problem of sampling from the Gibbs distribution $\mu$ in polynomial time. We prove that, for any inverse temperature…
Importance weighted variational inference (Burda et al., 2015) uses multiple i.i.d. samples to have a tighter variational lower bound. We believe a joint proposal has the potential of reducing the number of redundant samples, and introduce…
The Wasserstein metric is introduced as a probabilistic method to enable quantitative evaluations of LES combustion models. The Wasserstein metric can directly be evaluated from scatter data or statistical results using probabilistic…
In this paper we propose tight upper and lower bounds for the Wasserstein distance between any two {{univariate continuous distributions}} with probability densities $p_1$ and $p_2$ having nested supports. These explicit bounds are…
The two-sample homogeneity testing problem is fundamental in statistics and becomes particularly challenging in high dimensions, where classical tests can suffer substantial power loss. We develop a learning-assisted procedure based on the…
Motivated by the statistical and computational challenges of computing Wasserstein distances in high-dimensional contexts, machine learning researchers have defined modified Wasserstein distances based on computing distances between…
An independence model for discrete random variables is a Segre-Veronese variety in a probability simplex. Any metric on the set of joint states of the random variables induces a Wasserstein metric on the probability simplex. The unit ball…
We study distributionally robust quantile regression using type-$p$ Wasserstein ambiguity sets. We derive a closed-form expression for the worst-case quantile regression loss under general $p$-Wasserstein uncertainty. We further give a…
Approximate inference in probability models is a fundamental task in machine learning. Approximate inference provides powerful tools to Bayesian reasoning, decision making, and Bayesian deep learning. The main goal is to estimate the…
We study the minimax optimal rate for estimating the Wasserstein-$1$ metric between two unknown probability measures based on $n$ i.i.d. empirical samples from them. We show that estimating the Wasserstein metric itself between probability…
The Wasserstein barycenter problem seeks a probability measure that minimizes the weighted average of the Wasserstein distances to a given collection of probability measures. We study the discrete setting, where each measure has finite…
This paper investigates the use of retrospective approximation solution paradigm in solving risk-averse optimization problems effectively via importance sampling (IS). While IS serves as a prominent means for tackling the large sample…
We study the perturbation of a measure $\mu \in \mathscr{P}(\mathbb{R})$ consisting in superposing two copies of $\mu$, each slightly shifted by a small distance $\pm h$. The difference between $\mu$ and its perturbation is measured with a…