Related papers: Estimating Ratios of Normalizing Constants Using L…
The Auto-Importance Sampling (AIS) method is a Monte Carlo variance reduction technique proposed for deep penetration problems, which can significantly improve computational efficiency without pre-calculations for importance distribution.…
This paper describes a method for estimating the marginal likelihood or Bayes factors of Bayesian models using non-parametric importance sampling ("arrogance sampling"). This method can also be used to compute the normalizing constant of…
Undirected graphical models are widely used in statistics, physics and machine vision. However Bayesian parameter estimation for undirected models is extremely challenging, since evaluation of the posterior typically involves the…
Doubly intractable distributions arise in many settings, for example in Markov models for point processes and exponential random graph models for networks. Bayesian inference for these models is challenging because they involve intractable…
The frequentist method of simulated minimum distance (SMD) is widely used in economics to estimate complex models with an intractable likelihood. In other disciplines, a Bayesian approach known as Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) is…
We consider Bayesian inference by importance sampling when the likelihood is analytically intractable but can be unbiasedly estimated. We refer to this procedure as importance sampling squared (IS2), as we can often estimate the likelihood…
This thesis presents Regenerative Rejection Sampling (RRS), a novel approximate sampling algorithm inspired by classical Rejection Sampling and Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods. The method constructs a continuous-time regenerative process…
Importance sampling is a powerful tool for correcting the distributional mismatch in many statistical and machine learning problems, but in practice its performance is limited by the usage of simple proposals whose importance weights can be…
Understanding the dynamics of complex molecular processes is often linked to the study of infrequent transitions between long-lived stable states. The standard approach to the sampling of such rare events is to generate an ensemble of…
Distributed consensus has been widely studied for sensor network applications. Whereas the asymptotic convergence rate has been extensively explored in prior work, other important and practical issues, including energy efficiency and link…
In this paper we develop a continuous-time sequential importance sampling (CIS) algorithm which eliminates time-discretisation errors and provides online unbiased estimation for continuous time Markov processes, in particular for…
In the following article we provide an exposition of exact computational methods to perform parameter inference from partially observed network models. In particular, we consider the duplication attachment (DA) model which has a likelihood…
In this paper the choice of the Bernoulli distribution as biased distribution for importance sampling (IS) Monte-Carlo (MC) simulation of linear block codes over binary symmetric channels (BSCs) is studied. Based on the analytical…
Statistical model checking avoids the exponential growth of states associated with probabilistic model checking by estimating properties from multiple executions of a system and by giving results within confidence bounds. Rare properties…
Bridge sampling is a powerful Monte Carlo method for estimating ratios of normalizing constants. Various methods have been introduced to improve its efficiency. These methods aim to increase the overlap between the densities by applying…
The ever-increasing deployment of distributed resources and the opportunities offered to loads for more active roles has changed the previously unidirectional and relatively straight-forward operating profile of distribution systems (DS).…
Annealed Importance Sampling (AIS) moves particles along a Markov chain from a tractable initial distribution to an intractable target distribution. The recently proposed Differentiable AIS (DAIS) (Geffner and Domke, 2021; Zhang et al.,…
The network scale-up method (NSUM) is a cost-effective approach to estimating the size or prevalence of a group of people that is hard to reach through a standard survey. The basic NSUM involves two steps: estimating respondents' degrees by…
Mutual information (MI) is a fundamental quantity in information theory and machine learning. However, direct estimation of MI is intractable, even if the true joint probability density for the variables of interest is known, as it involves…
Many Bayesian inference problems involve high-dimensional models where the performance of standard importance sampling (IS) methods often degrades rapidly as the dimensionality increases. Classical analyses of IS typically rely on the…