Related papers: Annealed Importance Sampling
In many stochastic problems, the output of interest depends on an input random vector mainly through a single random variable (or index) via an appropriate univariate transformation of the input. We exploit this feature by proposing an…
Performance-based engineering for natural hazards facilitates the design and appraisal of structures with rigorous evaluation of their uncertain structural behavior under potentially extreme stochastic loads expressed in terms of failure…
We consider the efficient use of an approximation within Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), with subsequent importance sampling (IS) correction of the Markov chain inexact output, leading to asymptotically exact inference. We detail…
The Adaptive Multiple Importance Sampling (AMIS) algorithm is aimed at an optimal recycling of past simulations in an iterated importance sampling scheme. The difference with earlier adaptive importance sampling implementations like…
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…
Adaptive Monte Carlo methods are very efficient techniques designed to tune simulation estimators on-line. In this work, we present an alternative to stochastic approximation to tune the optimal change of measure in the context of…
We consider an evolving system for which a sequence of observations is being made, with each observation revealing additional information about current and past states of the system. We suppose each observation is made without error, but…
Estimating the probability of failure is a critical step in developing safety-critical autonomous systems. Direct estimation methods such as Monte Carlo sampling are often impractical due to the rarity of failures in these systems. Existing…
We review an established Bayesian sampling method called sampling/importance resampling and highlight situations in nuclear theory when it can be particularly useful. To this end we both analyse a toy problem and demonstrate realistic…
Sampling rare events in metastable dynamical systems is often a computationally expensive task and one needs to resort to enhanced sampling methods such as importance sampling. Since we can formulate the problem of finding optimal…
Monte Carlo sampling methods often suffer from long correlation times. Consequently, these methods must be run for many steps to generate an independent sample. In this paper a method is proposed to overcome this difficulty. The method…
Non-differentiable priors are standard in modern parsimonious Bayesian models. Lack of differentiability, however, precludes gradient-based Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) for posterior sampling. Recently proposed proximal MCMC approaches…
We develop a theoretical framework for studying numerical estimation of lower previsions, generally applicable to two-level Monte Carlo methods, importance sampling methods, and a wide range of other sampling methods one might devise. We…
In recent years, various interacting particle samplers have been developed to sample from complex target distributions, such as those found in Bayesian inverse problems. These samplers are motivated by the mean-field limit perspective and…
The importance-sampling Monte Carlo algorithm appears to be the universally optimal solution to the problem of sampling the state space of statistical mechanical systems according to the relative importance of configurations for the…
We introduce Path-ZVA: an efficient simulation technique for estimating the probability of reaching a rare goal state before a regeneration state in a (discrete-time) Markov chain. Standard Monte Carlo simulation techniques do not work well…
Reliability-oriented sensitivity analysis aims at combining both reliability and sensitivity analyses by quantifying the influence of each input variable of a numerical model on a quantity of interest related to its failure. In particular,…
Boltzmann machine is a powerful machine learning model with many real-world applications, for example by constructing deep belief networks. Statistical inference on a Boltzmann machine can be carried out by sampling from its posterior…
Differentiable annealed importance sampling (DAIS), proposed by Geffner & Domke (2021) and Zhang et al. (2021), allows optimizing over the initial distribution of AIS. In this paper, we show that, in the limit of many transitions, DAIS…
The purpose of this article is to extend the notion of statistical depth to the case of sample paths of a Markov chain. Initially introduced to define a center-outward ordering of points in the support of a multivariate distribution, depth…