90,938 research outputs found
Importance sampling the union of rare events with an application to power systems analysis
We consider importance sampling to estimate the probability of a union
of rare events defined by a random variable . The
sampler we study has been used in spatial statistics, genomics and
combinatorics going back at least to Karp and Luby (1983). It works by sampling
one event at random, then sampling conditionally on that event
happening and it constructs an unbiased estimate of by multiplying an
inverse moment of the number of occuring events by the union bound. We prove
some variance bounds for this sampler. For a sample size of , it has a
variance no larger than where is the union
bound. It also has a coefficient of variation no larger than
regardless of the overlap pattern among the
events. Our motivating problem comes from power system reliability, where the
phase differences between connected nodes have a joint Gaussian distribution
and the rare events arise from unacceptably large phase differences. In the
grid reliability problems even some events defined by constraints in
dimensions, with probability below , are estimated with a
coefficient of variation of about with only sample
values
Robust estimation of risks from small samples
Data-driven risk analysis involves the inference of probability distributions
from measured or simulated data. In the case of a highly reliable system, such
as the electricity grid, the amount of relevant data is often exceedingly
limited, but the impact of estimation errors may be very large. This paper
presents a robust nonparametric Bayesian method to infer possible underlying
distributions. The method obtains rigorous error bounds even for small samples
taken from ill-behaved distributions. The approach taken has a natural
interpretation in terms of the intervals between ordered observations, where
allocation of probability mass across intervals is well-specified, but the
location of that mass within each interval is unconstrained. This formulation
gives rise to a straightforward computational resampling method: Bayesian
Interval Sampling. In a comparison with common alternative approaches, it is
shown to satisfy strict error bounds even for ill-behaved distributions.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures; supplementary information provided. A revised
version of this manuscript has been accepted for publication in Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering
Science
Adaptive Importance Sampling for Performance Evaluation and Parameter Optimization of Communication Systems
We present new adaptive importance sampling techniques based on stochastic Newton recursions. Their applicability to the performance evaluation of communication systems is studied. Besides bit-error rate (BER) estimation, the techniques are used for system parameter optimization. Two system models that are analytically tractable are employed to demonstrate the validity of the techniques. As an application to situations that are analytically intractable and numerically intensive, the influence of crosstalk in a wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) crossconnect is assessed. In order to consider a realistic system model, optimal setting of thresholds in the detector is carried out while estimating error rate performances. Resulting BER estimates indicate that the tolerable crosstalk levels are significantly higher than predicted in the literature. This finding has a strong impact on the design of WDM networks. Power penalties induced by the addition of channels can also be accurately predicted in short run-time
Importance Sampling and its Optimality for Stochastic Simulation Models
We consider the problem of estimating an expected outcome from a stochastic
simulation model. Our goal is to develop a theoretical framework on importance
sampling for such estimation. By investigating the variance of an importance
sampling estimator, we propose a two-stage procedure that involves a regression
stage and a sampling stage to construct the final estimator. We introduce a
parametric and a nonparametric regression estimator in the first stage and
study how the allocation between the two stages affects the performance of the
final estimator. We analyze the variance reduction rates and derive oracle
properties of both methods. We evaluate the empirical performances of the
methods using two numerical examples and a case study on wind turbine
reliability evaluation.Comment: 37 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables. Accepted to the Electronic Journal of
Statistic
Large-deviation principles for connectable receivers in wireless networks
We study large-deviation principles for a model of wireless networks
consisting of Poisson point processes of transmitters and receivers,
respectively. To each transmitter we associate a family of connectable
receivers whose signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio is larger than a certain
connectivity threshold. First, we show a large-deviation principle for the
empirical measure of connectable receivers associated with transmitters in
large boxes. Second, making use of the observation that the receivers
connectable to the origin form a Cox point process, we derive a large-deviation
principle for the rescaled process of these receivers as the connection
threshold tends to zero. Finally, we show how these results can be used to
develop importance-sampling algorithms that substantially reduce the variance
for the estimation of probabilities of certain rare events such as users being
unable to connectComment: 29 pages, 2 figure
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