927 research outputs found
Efficient rare-event simulation for the maximum of heavy-tailed random walks
Let be a sequence of i.i.d. r.v.'s with negative mean. Set
and define . We propose an importance sampling
algorithm to estimate the tail of that is strongly
efficient for both light and heavy-tailed increment distributions. Moreover, in
the case of heavy-tailed increments and under additional technical assumptions,
our estimator can be shown to have asymptotically vanishing relative variance
in the sense that its coefficient of variation vanishes as the tail parameter
increases. A key feature of our algorithm is that it is state-dependent. In the
presence of light tails, our procedure leads to Siegmund's (1979) algorithm.
The rigorous analysis of efficiency requires new Lyapunov-type inequalities
that can be useful in the study of more general importance sampling algorithms.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/07-AAP485 the Annals of
Applied Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aap/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
Efficient Rare-event Simulation for Perpetuities
We consider perpetuities of the form D = B_1 exp(Y_1) + B_2 exp(Y_1+Y_2) +
... where the Y_j's and B_j's might be i.i.d. or jointly driven by a suitable
Markov chain. We assume that the Y_j's satisfy the so-called Cramer condition
with associated root theta_{ast} in (0,infty) and that the tails of the B_j's
are appropriately behaved so that D is regularly varying with index
theta_{ast}. We illustrate by means of an example that the natural
state-independent importance sampling estimator obtained by exponentially
tilting the Y_j's according to theta_{ast} fails to provide an efficient
estimator (in the sense of appropriately controlling the relative mean squared
error as the tail probability of interest gets smaller). Then, we construct
estimators based on state-dependent importance sampling that are rigorously
shown to be efficient
Monte Carlo Estimation of the Density of the Sum of Dependent Random Variables
We study an unbiased estimator for the density of a sum of random variables
that are simulated from a computer model. A numerical study on examples with
copula dependence is conducted where the proposed estimator performs favourably
in terms of variance compared to other unbiased estimators. We provide
applications and extensions to the estimation of marginal densities in Bayesian
statistics and to the estimation of the density of sums of random variables
under Gaussian copula dependence
Analysis of a Splitting Estimator for Rare Event Probabilities in Jackson Networks
We consider a standard splitting algorithm for the rare-event simulation of
overflow probabilities in any subset of stations in a Jackson network at level
n, starting at a fixed initial position. It was shown in DeanDup09 that a
subsolution to the Isaacs equation guarantees that a subexponential number of
function evaluations (in n) suffice to estimate such overflow probabilities
within a given relative accuracy. Our analysis here shows that in fact
O(n^{2{\beta}+1}) function evaluations suffice to achieve a given relative
precision, where {\beta} is the number of bottleneck stations in the network.
This is the first rigorous analysis that allows to favorably compare splitting
against directly computing the overflow probability of interest, which can be
evaluated by solving a linear system of equations with O(n^{d}) variables.Comment: 23 page
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