Daniel Sanz-Alonso arXived a note yesterday where he analyses importance sampling from the point of view of empirical distributions. With the difficulty that unnormalised importance sampling estimators are not associated with an empirical distribution since the sum of the weights is not one. For several f-divergences, he obtains upper bounds on those divergences between the empirical cdf and a uniform version, D(w,u), which translate into lower bounds on the importance sample size. I however do not see why this divergence between a weighted sampled and the uniformly weighted version is relevant for the divergence between the target and the proposal, nor how the resulting Monte Carlo estimator is impacted by this bound. A side remark [in the paper] is that those results apply to infinite variance Monte Carlo estimators, as in the recent paper of Chatterjee and Diaconis I discussed earlier, which also discussed the necessary sample size.
Archive for efficient importance sampling
importance sampling and necessary sample size
Posted in Books, Statistics with tags arXiv, efficient importance sampling, infinite variance estimators, Monte Carlo approximations, Monte Carlo Statistical Methods, Persi Diaconis on September 7, 2016 by xi'anreading classics (The End)
Posted in Books, Kids, Statistics, University life with tags advanced Monte Carlo methods, classics, efficient importance sampling, evidence, Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, Monte Carlo Statistical Methods, nested sampling, seminar, slides, Université Paris Dauphine on February 24, 2015 by xi'an
Today was the final session of our Reading Classics Seminar for the academic year 2014-2015. I have not reported on this seminar much so far because it has had starting problems, namely hardly any student present on the first classes and therefore several re-starts until we reached a small group of interested students. And this is truly The End for this enjoyable experiment as this is the final year for my TSI Master at Paris-Dauphine, as it will become integrated within the new MASH Master next year.
As a last presentation for the entire series, my student picked John Skilling’s Nested Sampling, not that it was in my list of “classics”, but he had worked on the paper in a summer project and was thus reasonably fluent with the topic. As he did a good enough job (!), here are his slides.
Some of the questions that came to me during the talk were on how to run nested sampling sequentially, both in the data and in the number of simulated points, and on incorporating more deterministic moves in order to remove some of the Monte Carlo variability. I was about to ask about (!) the Hamiltonian version of nested sampling but then he mentioned his last summer internship on this very topic! I also realised during that talk that the formula (for positive random variables)
![\int_0^\infty(1-F(x))\text{d}x = \mathbb{E}_F[X]](https://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=%5Cint_0%5E%5Cinfty%281-F%28x%29%29%5Ctext%7Bd%7Dx+%3D+%5Cmathbb%7BE%7D_F%5BX%5D&bg=000000&fg=B0B0B0&s=0&c=20201002)
does not require absolute continuity of the distribution F.
particle efficient importance sampling
Posted in Statistics with tags efficient importance sampling, hidden Markov models, importance sampling, particle filters, sequential Monte Carlo, state space model, stochastic volatility on October 15, 2013 by xi'anMarcel Scharth and Robert Kohn just arXived a new article entitled “particle efficient importance sampling“. What is—the efficiency—about?! The spectacular diminution in variance—(the authors mention a factor of 6,000 when compared with regular particle filters!—in a stochastic volatility simulation study.
If I got the details right, the improvement stems from a paper by Richard and Zhang (Journal of Econometrics, 2007). In a state-space/hidden Markov model setting, (non-sequential) importance sampling tries to approximate the smoothing distribution one term at a time, ie p(xt|xt-1,y1:n), but Richard and Zhang (2007) modify the target by looking at
p(yt|xt)p(xt|xt-1)χ(xt-1,y1:n),
where the last term χ(xt-1,y1:n) is the normalising constant of the proposal kernel for the previous (in t-1) target, k(xt-1|xt-2,y1:n). This kernel is actually parameterised as k(xt-1|xt-2,at(y1:n)) and the EIS algorithm optimises those parameters, one term at a time. The current paper expands Richard and Zhang (2007) by using particles to approximate the likelihood contribution and reduce the variance once the “optimal” EIS solution is obtained. (They also reproduce Richard’s and Zhang’s tricks of relying on the same common random numbers.
This approach sounds like a “miracle” to me, in the sense(s) that (a) the “normalising constant” is far from being uniquely defined (and just as far from being constant in the parameter at) and (b) it is unrelated with the target distribution (except for the optimisation step). In the extreme case when the normalising constant is also constant… in at, this step clearly is useless. (This also opens the potential for an optimisation in the choice of χ(xt-1,y1:n)…)
The simulation study starts from a univariate stochastic volatility model relying on two hidden correlated AR(1) models. (There may be a typo in the definition in Section 4.1, i.e. a Φi missing.) In those simulations, EIS brings a significant variance reduction when compared with standard particle filters and particle EIS further improves upon EIS by a factor of 2 to 20 (in the variance). I could not spot in the paper which choice had been made for χ()… which is annoying as I gathered from my reading that it must have a strong impact on the efficiency attached to the name of the method!
