Related papers: Estimating Ratios of Normalizing Constants Using L…
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…
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, demonstrating unprecedented capabilities across various natural language processing tasks. However, the high costs associated with such exceptional performance limit the…
Computing partition functions, the normalizing constants of probability distributions, is often hard. Variants of importance sampling give unbiased estimates of a normalizer Z, however, unbiased estimates of the reciprocal 1/Z are harder to…
Estimating rare events in complex systems is a key challenge in reliability analysis. The challenge grows in multimodal problems, where traditional methods often rely on a small set of design points and risk overlooking critical failure…
Many high dimensional integrals can be reduced to the problem of finding the relative measures of two sets. Often one set will be exponentially larger than the other, making it difficult to compare the sizes. A standard method of dealing…
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…
We discuss estimating the probability that the sum of nonnegative independent and identically distributed random variables falls below a given threshold, i.e., $\mathbb{P}(\sum_{i=1}^{N}{X_i} \leq \gamma)$, via importance sampling (IS). We…
Adaptive importance sampling is a class of techniques for finding good proposal distributions for importance sampling. Often the proposal distributions are standard probability distributions whose parameters are adapted based on the…
In many scientific applications, the target probability distribution cannot be evaluated in closed form or sampled from directly. Instead, it can often be decomposed into multiple components, some of which are accessible only through…
Importance sampling (IS) is a Monte Carlo technique that relies on weighted samples, simulated from a proposal distribution, to estimate intractable integrals. The quality of the estimators improves with the number of samples. However, for…
A new approach of obtaining stratified random samples from statistically dependent random variables is described. The proposed method can be used to obtain samples from the input space of a computer forward model in estimating expectations…
Multiple importance sampling estimators are widely used for computing intractable constants due to its reliability and robustness. The celebrated balance heuristic estimator belongs to this class of methods and has proved very successful in…
We consider estimating the marginal likelihood in settings with independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) data. We propose estimating the predictive distributions in a sequential factorization of the marginal likelihood in such…
Importance sampling (IS) as an elegant and efficient variance reduction (VR) technique for the acceleration of stochastic optimization problems has attracted many researches recently. Unlike commonly adopted stochastic uniform sampling in…
In this paper we develop a methodology that we call split sampling methods to estimate high dimensional expectations and rare event probabilities. Split sampling uses an auxiliary variable MCMC simulation and expresses the expectation of…
Sampling is an important tool for estimating large, complex sums and integrals over high dimensional spaces. For instance, important sampling has been used as an alternative to exact methods for inference in belief networks. Ideally, we…
Through examples of coordinate and probability transformation between different distributions, the basic principle of normalizing flow is introduced in a simple and concise manner. From the perspective of the distribution of random variable…
Model fitting is possibly the most extended problem in science. Classical approaches include the use of least-squares fitting procedures and maximum likelihood methods to estimate the value of the parameters in the model. However, in recent…
This article investigates the integration of quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) methods using the Adaptive Multiple Importance Sampling (AMIS). Traditional Importance Sampling (IS) often suffers from poor performance since it heavily relies on the…
Transition path sampling is a method for estimating the rates of rare events in molecular systems based on the gradual transformation of a path distribution containing a small fraction of reactive trajectories into a biased distribution in…