In this paper we present the first practical method for importance sampling functions represented as spherical harmonics (SH). Given a spherical probability density function (PDF) represented as a vector of SH coefficients, our method warps an input point set to match the target PDF using hierarchical sample warping. Our approach is efficient and produces high quality sample distributions. As a...

Importance weighting is a convenient general way to adjust for draws from the wrong distribution, but the resulting ratio estimate can be noisy when the importance weights have a heavy right tail, as routinely occurs when there are aspects of the target distribution not well captured by the approximating distribution. More stable estimates can be obtained by truncating the importance ratios. He...

Greedy importance sampling is an unbiased estimation technique that reduces the variance of standard importance sampling by explicitly searching for modes in the estimation objective. Previous work has demonstrated the feasibility of implementing this method and proved that the technique is unbiased in both discrete and continuous domains. In this paper we present a reformulation of greedy impo...

Minibatching is a very well studied and highly popular technique in supervised learning, used by practitioners due to its ability to accelerate training through better utilization of parallel processing power and reduction of stochastic variance. Another popular technique is importance sampling – a strategy for preferential sampling of more important examples also capable of accelerating the tr...

Monte Carlo methods represent the de facto standard for approximating complicated integrals involving multidimensional target distributions. In order to generate random realizations from the target distribution, Monte Carlo techniques use simpler proposal probability densities for drawing candidate samples. Performance of any such method is strictly related to the specification of the proposal ...

We provide a short overview of Importance Sampling – a popular sampling tool used for Monte Carlo computing. We discuss its mathematical foundation and properties that determine its accuracy in Monte Carlo approximations. We review the fundamental developments in designing efficient IS for practical use. This includes parametric approximation with optimization based adaptation, sequential sampl...

Sequential random sampling (‘Markov Chain Monte-Carlo’) is a popular strategy for many vision problems involving multimodal distributions over high-dimensional parameter spaces. It applies both to importance sampling (where one wants to sample points according to their ‘importance’ for some calculation, but otherwise fairly) and to global optimization (where one wants to find good minima, or at...

In this paper we analyze a particular issue of estimation, namely the estimation of the expected value of an unknown function for a given distribution, with the samples drawn from other distributions. A motivation of this problem comes from machine learning. In reinforcement learning, an intelligent agent that learns to make decisions in an unknown environment encounters the problem of judging ...

We propose an unconstrained stochastic approximation method of finding the optimal measure change (in an a priori parametric family) for Monte Carlo simulations. We consider different parametric families based on the Girsanov theorem and the Esscher transform (or exponentialtilting). In a multidimensional Gaussian framework, Arouna uses a projected Robbins-Monro procedure to select the paramete...

In this note, we shortly survey some recent approaches on the approximation of the Bayes factor used in Bayesian hypothesis testing and in Bayesian model choice. In particular, we reassess importance sampling, harmonic mean sampling, and nested sampling from a unified perspective.