Related papers: Estimating Ratios of Normalizing Constants Using L…
We propose a modification of the improved cross entropy (iCE) method to enhance its performance for network reliability assessment. The iCE method performs a transition from the nominal density to the optimal importance sampling (IS)…
Importance sampling (IS) is a Monte Carlo technique for the approximation of intractable distributions and integrals with respect to them. The origin of IS dates from the early 1950s. In the last decades, the rise of the Bayesian paradigm…
Importance Sampling methods are broadly used to approximate posterior distributions or some of their moments. In its standard approach, samples are drawn from a single proposal distribution and weighted properly. However, since the…
Many applications in computational sciences and statistical inference require the computation of expectations with respect to complex high-dimensional distributions with unknown normalization constants, as well as the estimation of these…
Annealed Importance Sampling (AIS) is a popular algorithm used to estimates the intractable marginal likelihood of deep generative models. Although AIS is guaranteed to provide unbiased estimate for any set of hyperparameters, the common…
The efficient importance sampling (EIS) method is a general principle for the numerical evaluation of high-dimensional integrals that uses the sequential structure of target integrands to build variance minimising importance samplers.…
We review two recently developed efficient methods for calculating rate constants of processes dominated by rare events in high-dimensional complex systems. The first is transition interface sampling (TIS), based on the measurement of…
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…
Annealed importance sampling (AIS) is the gold standard for estimating partition functions or marginal likelihoods, corresponding to importance sampling over a path of distributions between a tractable base and an unnormalized target. While…
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…
We explore efficient estimation of statistical quantities, particularly rare event probabilities, for stochastic reaction networks. Consequently, we propose an importance sampling (IS) approach to improve the Monte Carlo (MC) estimator…
Given an unnormalized probability density $\pi\propto\mathrm{e}^{-V}$, estimating its normalizing constant $Z=\int_{\mathbb{R}^d}\mathrm{e}^{-V(x)}\mathrm{d}x$ or free energy $F=-\log Z$ is a crucial problem in Bayesian statistics,…
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…
Annealed importance sampling (AIS) and related algorithms are highly effective tools for marginal likelihood estimation, but are not fully differentiable due to the use of Metropolis-Hastings correction steps. Differentiability is a…
We propose an algorithm, termed the Non-Equilibrium Transport Sampler (NETS), to sample from unnormalized probability distributions. NETS can be viewed as a variant of annealed importance sampling (AIS) based on Jarzynski's equality, in…
The self-normalized importance sampling (SNIS) estimator is a Monte Carlo estimator widely used to approximate expectations in statistical signal processing and machine learning. The efficiency of SNIS depends on the choice of proposal, but…
Reliability updating refers to a problem that integrates Bayesian updating technique with structural reliability analysis and cannot be directly solved by structural reliability methods (SRMs) when it involves equality information. The…
Nonequilibrium sampling is potentially much more versatile than its equilibrium counterpart, but it comes with challenges because the invariant distribution is not typically known when the dynamics breaks detailed balance. Here, we derive a…
Multiple importance sampling (MIS) methods use a set of proposal distributions from which samples are drawn. Each sample is then assigned an importance weight that can be obtained according to different strategies. This work is motivated by…
Importance sampling (IS) is a powerful Monte Carlo (MC) methodology for approximating integrals, for instance in the context of Bayesian inference. In IS, the samples are simulated from the so-called proposal distribution, and the choice of…