Related papers: Efficient importance sampling for Monte Carlo eval…
Importance sampling is a widely used technique to estimate properties of a distribution. This paper investigates trading-off some bias for variance by adaptively winsorizing the importance sampling estimator. The novel winsorizing…
Recent advances in Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) extend the scope of Bayesian inference to models for which the likelihood function is intractable. Although these developments allow us to estimate model parameters, other basic problems…
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…
We describe Monte Carlo approximation to the maximum likelihood estimator in models with intractable norming constants and explanatory variables. We consider both sources of randomness (due to the initial sample and to Monte Carlo…
We investigate the stability of a Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) method applied to the problem of sampling from a target distribution on $\mathbb{R}^d$ for large $d$. It is well known that using a single importance sampling step one produces…
Importance sampling is widely used in machine learning and statistics, but its power is limited by the restriction of using simple proposals for which the importance weights can be tractably calculated. We address this problem by studying…
In this work, we consider the problem of estimating the probability distribution, the quantile or the conditional expectation above the quantile, the so called conditional-value-at-risk, of output quantities of complex random differential…
The effective sample size (ESS) is widely used in sample-based simulation methods for assessing the quality of a Monte Carlo approximation of a given distribution and of related integrals. In this paper, we revisit the approximation of the…
Off-policy policy estimators that use importance sampling (IS) can suffer from high variance in long-horizon domains, and there has been particular excitement over new IS methods that leverage the structure of Markov decision processes. We…
Estimating the left tail of quadratic forms in Gaussian random vectors is of major practical importance in many applications. In this paper, we propose an efficient and robust importance sampling estimator that is endowed with the bounded…
The montecarlo method, which is quite commonly used to solve maximum entropy problems in statistical physics, can actually be used to solve inverse problems in a much wider context. The probability distribution which maximizes entropy can…
A number of algorithms have been developed to solve probabilistic inference problems on belief networks. These algorithms can be divided into two main groups: exact techniques which exploit the conditional independence revealed when the…
We investigate the properties of a sequential Monte Carlo method where the particle weight that appears in the algorithm is estimated by a positive, unbiased estimator. We present broadly-applicable convergence results, including a central…
This paper introduces a new Importance Sampling scheme, called Adaptive Twisted Importance Sampling, which is adequate for the improved estimation of rare event probabilities in he range of moderate deviations pertaining to the empirical…
An introduction to numerical large-deviation sampling is provided. First, direct biasing with a known distribution is explained. As simple example, the Bernoulli experiment is used throughout the text. Next, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)…
Monte Carlo and Quasi-Monte Carlo methods present a convenient approach for approximating the expected value of a random variable. Algorithms exist to adaptively sample the random variable until a user defined absolute error tolerance is…
Running a reliability analysis on engineering problems involving complex numerical models can be computationally very expensive, requiring advanced simulation methods to reduce the overall numerical cost. Gaussian process based active…
We consider the problem of simulating loss probabilities and conditional excesses for linear asset portfolios under the t-copula model. Although in the literature on market risk management there are papers proposing efficient variance…
We develop a new method to sample from posterior distributions in hierarchical models without using Markov chain Monte Carlo. This method, which is a variant of importance sampling ideas, is generally applicable to high-dimensional models…
In this paper, we propose a novel and generic family of multiple importance sampling estimators. We first revisit the celebrated balance heuristic estimator, a widely used Monte Carlo technique for the approximation of intractable…