Related papers: Dynamic importance sampling for uniformly recurren…
We present several Monte Carlo strategies for simulating discrete-time Markov chains with continuous multi-dimensional state space; we focus on stratified techniques. We first analyze the variance of the calculation of the measure of a…
We introduce and test an algorithm that adaptively estimates large deviation functions characterizing the fluctuations of additive functionals of Markov processes in the long-time limit. These functions play an important role for predicting…
We propose an adaptive importance sampling scheme for the simulation of rare events when the underlying dynamics is given by a diffusion. The scheme is based on a Gibbs variational principle that is used to determine the optimal (i.e.…
Adaptive Monte Carlo methods are recent variance reduction techniques. In this work, we propose a mathematical setting which greatly relaxes the assumptions needed by for the adaptive importance sampling techniques presented by Vazquez-Abad…
The basic problem in equilibrium statistical mechanics is to compute phase space average, in which Monte Carlo method plays a very important role. We begin with a review of nonlocal algorithms for Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation in…
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…
Sampling from complicated probability distributions is a hard computational problem arising in many fields, including statistical physics, optimization, and machine learning. Quantum computers have recently been used to sample from…
This paper considers the classical problem of sampling with Monte Carlo methods a target rare event distribution defined by a score function that is very expensive to compute. We assume we can build using evaluations of the true score, an…
Long iterative training processes for Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are commonly required to achieve state-of-the-art performance in many computer vision tasks. Importance sampling approaches might play a key role in budgeted training…
Distortion risk measures play a critical role in quantifying risks associated with uncertain outcomes. Accurately estimating these risk measures in the context of computationally expensive simulation models that lack analytical tractability…
Irreversible and rejection-free Monte Carlo methods, recently developed in Physics under the name Event-Chain and known in Statistics as Piecewise Deterministic Monte Carlo (PDMC), have proven to produce clear acceleration over standard…
Some classical uncertainty quantification problems require the estimation of multiple expectations. Estimating all of them accurately is crucial and can have a major impact on the analysis to perform, and standard existing Monte Carlo…
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 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…
Importance sampling (IS) is a powerful Monte Carlo methodology for the approximation of intractable integrals, very often involving a target probability density function. The performance of IS heavily depends on the appropriate selection of…
Molecular dynamics simulations are widely used across chemistry, physics, and biology, providing quantitative insight into complex processes with atomic detail. However, their limited timescale of a few microseconds is a significant…
Parameter estimation for discretely observed Markov processes is a challenging problem. However, simulation of Markov processes is straightforward using the Gillespie algorithm. We exploit this ease of simulation to develop an effective…
Importance weighting is a general way to adjust Monte Carlo integration to account for draws from the wrong distribution, but the resulting estimate can be highly variable when the importance ratios have a heavy right tail. This routinely…
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…
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…