Related papers: Annealed Importance Sampling
Doubly intractable models are encountered in a number of fields, e.g. social networks, ecology and epidemiology. Inference for such models requires the evaluation of a likelihood function, whose normalising factor depends on the model…
We present an importance sampling algorithm that can produce realisations of Markovian epidemic models that exactly match observations, taken to be the number of a single event type over a period of time. The importance sampling can be used…
This paper considers importance sampling for estimation of rare-event probabilities in a specific collection of Markovian jump processes used for e.g. modelling of credit risk. Previous attempts at designing importance sampling algorithms…
Implicit sampling is a weighted sampling method that is used in data assimilation, where one sequentially updates estimates of the state of a stochastic model based on a stream of noisy or incomplete data. Here we describe how to use…
In machine learning models, the estimation of errors is often complex due to distribution bias, particularly in spatial data such as those found in environmental studies. We introduce an approach based on the ideas of importance sampling to…
Bayesian inference for models that have an intractable partition function is known as a doubly intractable problem, where standard Monte Carlo methods are not applicable. The past decade has seen the development of auxiliary variable Monte…
A large class of spatial models contains intractable normalizing functions, such as spatial lattice models, interaction spatial point processes, and social network models. Bayesian inference for such models is challenging since the…
Markov chain Monte Carlo methods are a powerful and commonly used family of numerical methods for sampling from complex probability distributions. As applications of these methods increase in size and complexity, the need for efficient…
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…
In this work, we propose a smart idea to couple importance sampling and Multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC). We advocate a per level approach with as many importance sampling parameters as the number of levels, which enables us to compute the…
This article presents new methodology for sample-based Bayesian inference when data are partitioned and communication between the parts is expensive, as arises by necessity in the context of "big data" or by choice in order to take…
We discuss a classical reinterpretation of quantum-mechanics-based analysis of classical Markov chains with detailed balance, that is based on the quantum-classical correspondence. The classical reinterpretation is then used to demonstrate…
Given an energy potential on the Euclidian space, a piecewise deterministic Markov process is designed to sample the corresponding Gibbs measure. In dimension one an Eyring-Kramers formula is obtained for the exit time of the domain of a…
Sampling is often a necessary evil to reduce the processing and storage costs of distributed tracing. In this work, we describe a scalable and adaptive sampling approach that can preserve events of interest better than the widely used…
Informed Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have been proposed as scalable solutions to Bayesian posterior computation on high-dimensional discrete state spaces, but theoretical results about their convergence behavior in general…
We propose a general and scalable approximate sampling strategy for probabilistic models with discrete variables. Our approach uses gradients of the likelihood function with respect to its discrete inputs to propose updates in a…
We consider quantile estimation using Markov chain Monte Carlo and establish conditions under which the sampling distribution of the Monte Carlo error is approximately Normal. Further, we investigate techniques to estimate the associated…
In sampling tasks, it is common for target distributions to be known up to a normalizing constant. However, in many situations, even evaluating the unnormalized distribution can be costly or infeasible. This issue arises in scenarios such…
This paper provides an introductory overview of how one may employ importance sampling effectively as a tool for solving stochastic optimization formulations incorporating tail risk measures such as Conditional Value-at-Risk. Approximating…
Boson sampling is a promising candidate for quantum supremacy. It requires to sample from a complicated distribution, and is trusted to be intractable on classical computers. Among the various classical sampling methods, the Markov chain…