Related papers: Dynamic importance sampling for uniformly recurren…
We present an importance sampling algorithm that can produce realisations of Markovian epidemic models that exactly match observations, taken to be the number of a single event type over a period of time. The importance sampling can be used…
Importance sampling is a common technique for Monte Carlo approximation, including Monte Carlo approximation of p-values. Here it is shown that a simple correction of the usual importance sampling p-values creates valid p-values, meaning…
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…
Markov chain (MC) algorithms are ubiquitous in machine learning and statistics and many other disciplines. Typically, these algorithms can be formulated as acceptance rejection methods. In this work we present a novel estimator applicable…
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…
Advanced algorithms are necessary to obtain faster-than-real-time dynamic simulations in a number of different physical problems that are characterized by widely disparate time scales. Recent advanced dynamic Monte Carlo algorithms that…
This paper considers a new approach to using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) in contexts where one may adopt multilevel (ML) Monte Carlo. The underlying problem is to approximate expectations w.r.t. an underlying probability measure that is…
Monte Carlo sampling techniques have broad applications in machine learning, Bayesian posterior inference, and parameter estimation. Often the target distribution takes the form of a product distribution over a dataset with a large number…
We present a new method for conducting Monte Carlo inference in graphical models which combines explicit search with generalized importance sampling. The idea is to reduce the variance of importance sampling by searching for significant…
An important step in the design of autonomous systems is to evaluate the probability that a failure will occur. In safety-critical domains, the failure probability is extremely small so that the evaluation of a policy through Monte Carlo…
Probabilistic graphical models, such as Markov random fields (MRFs), are useful for describing high-dimensional distributions in terms of local dependence structures. The probabilistic inference is a fundamental problem related to graphical…
There has been substantial interest in developing Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms based on piecewise-deterministic Markov processes. However existing algorithms can only be used if the target distribution of interest is differentiable…
Piecewise deterministic Markov processes (PDMPs) can be used to model complex dynamical industrial systems. The counterpart of this modeling capability is their simulation cost, which makes reliability assessment untractable with standard…
In the field of structural reliability, the Monte-Carlo estimator is considered as the reference probability estimator. However, it is still untractable for real engineering cases since it requires a high number of runs of the model. In…
Estimating the probability of failure is a critical step in developing safety-critical autonomous systems. Direct estimation methods such as Monte Carlo sampling are often impractical due to the rarity of failures in these systems. Existing…
We show that the variance of the Monte Carlo estimator that is importance sampled from an exponential family is a convex function of the natural parameter of the distribution. With this insight, we propose an adaptive importance sampling…
Markov decision processes (MDP) are useful to model optimisation problems in concurrent systems. To verify MDPs with efficient Monte Carlo techniques requires that their nondeterminism be resolved by a scheduler. Recent work has introduced…
In this manuscript, we investigate importance sampling methods for rare-event simulation in diffusion processes. We show, from a large-deviation perspective, that the resulting importance sampling estimator is log-efficient. This connection…
We introduce data structures for solving robust regression through stochastic gradient descent (SGD) by sampling gradients with probability proportional to their norm, i.e., importance sampling. Although SGD is widely used for large scale…
In order to sample from a given target distribution (often of Gibbs type), the Monte Carlo Markov chain method consists in constructing an ergodic Markov process whose invariant measure is the target distribution. By sampling the Markov…