18,203 research outputs found
SMCTC : sequential Monte Carlo in C++
Sequential Monte Carlo methods are a very general class of Monte Carlo methods for sampling from sequences of distributions. Simple examples of these algorithms are used very widely in the tracking and signal processing literature. Recent developments illustrate that these techniques have much more general applicability, and can be applied very effectively to statistical inference problems. Unfortunately, these methods are often perceived as being computationally expensive and difficult to implement. This article seeks to address both of these problems. A C++ template class library for the efficient and convenient implementation of very general Sequential Monte Carlo algorithms is presented. Two example applications are provided: a simple particle filter for illustrative purposes and a state-of-the-art algorithm for rare event estimation
SMCTC: Sequential Monte Carlo in C++
Sequential Monte Carlo methods are a very general class of Monte Carlo methods for sampling from sequences of distributions. Simple examples of these algorithms are used very widely in the tracking and signal processing literature. Recent developments illustrate that these techniques have much more general applicability, and can be applied very effectively to statistical inference problems. Unfortunately, these methods are often perceived as being computationally expensive and difficult to implement. This article seeks to address both of these problems. A C++ template class library for the efficient and convenient implementation of very general Sequential Monte Carlo algorithms is presented. Two example applications are provided: a simple particle filter for illustrative purposes and a state-of-the-art algorithm for rare event estimation.
Bounding rare event probabilities in computer experiments
We are interested in bounding probabilities of rare events in the context of
computer experiments. These rare events depend on the output of a physical
model with random input variables. Since the model is only known through an
expensive black box function, standard efficient Monte Carlo methods designed
for rare events cannot be used. We then propose a strategy to deal with this
difficulty based on importance sampling methods. This proposal relies on
Kriging metamodeling and is able to achieve sharp upper confidence bounds on
the rare event probabilities. The variability due to the Kriging metamodeling
step is properly taken into account. The proposed methodology is applied to a
toy example and compared to more standard Bayesian bounds. Finally, a
challenging real case study is analyzed. It consists of finding an upper bound
of the probability that the trajectory of an airborne load will collide with
the aircraft that has released it.Comment: 21 pages, 6 figure
Split Sampling: Expectations, Normalisation and Rare Events
In this paper we develop a methodology that we call split sampling methods to
estimate high dimensional expectations and rare event probabilities. Split
sampling uses an auxiliary variable MCMC simulation and expresses the
expectation of interest as an integrated set of rare event probabilities. We
derive our estimator from a Rao-Blackwellised estimate of a marginal auxiliary
variable distribution. We illustrate our method with two applications. First,
we compute a shortest network path rare event probability and compare our
method to estimation to a cross entropy approach. Then, we compute a
normalisation constant of a high dimensional mixture of Gaussians and compare
our estimate to one based on nested sampling. We discuss the relationship
between our method and other alternatives such as the product of conditional
probability estimator and importance sampling. The methods developed here are
available in the R package: SplitSampling
Bayesian subset simulation
We consider the problem of estimating a probability of failure ,
defined as the volume of the excursion set of a function above a given threshold, under a given
probability measure on . In this article, we combine the popular
subset simulation algorithm (Au and Beck, Probab. Eng. Mech. 2001) and our
sequential Bayesian approach for the estimation of a probability of failure
(Bect, Ginsbourger, Li, Picheny and Vazquez, Stat. Comput. 2012). This makes it
possible to estimate when the number of evaluations of is very
limited and is very small. The resulting algorithm is called Bayesian
subset simulation (BSS). A key idea, as in the subset simulation algorithm, is
to estimate the probabilities of a sequence of excursion sets of above
intermediate thresholds, using a sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) approach. A
Gaussian process prior on is used to define the sequence of densities
targeted by the SMC algorithm, and drive the selection of evaluation points of
to estimate the intermediate probabilities. Adaptive procedures are
proposed to determine the intermediate thresholds and the number of evaluations
to be carried out at each stage of the algorithm. Numerical experiments
illustrate that BSS achieves significant savings in the number of function
evaluations with respect to other Monte Carlo approaches
Probabilistic Reachability Analysis for Large Scale Stochastic Hybrid Systems
This paper studies probabilistic reachability analysis for large scale stochastic hybrid systems (SHS) as a problem of rare event estimation. In literature, advanced rare event estimation theory has recently been embedded within a stochastic analysis framework, and this has led to significant novel results in rare event estimation for a diffusion process using sequential MC simulation. This paper presents this rare event estimation theory directly in terms of probabilistic reachability analysis of an SHS, and develops novel theory which allows to extend the novel results for application to a large scale SHS where a very huge number of rare discrete modes may contribute significantly to the reach probability. Essentially, the approach taken is to introduce an aggregation of the discrete modes, and to develop importance sampling relative to the rare switching between the aggregation modes. The practical working of this approach is demonstrated for the safety verification of an advanced air traffic control example
A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach to Rare Event Estimation
An important step in the design of autonomous systems is to evaluate the
probability that a failure will occur. In safety-critical domains, the failure
probability is extremely small so that the evaluation of a policy through Monte
Carlo sampling is inefficient. Adaptive importance sampling approaches have
been developed for rare event estimation but do not scale well to sequential
systems with long horizons. In this work, we develop two adaptive importance
sampling algorithms that can efficiently estimate the probability of rare
events for sequential decision making systems. The basis for these algorithms
is the minimization of the Kullback-Leibler divergence between a
state-dependent proposal distribution and a target distribution over
trajectories, but the resulting algorithms resemble policy gradient and
value-based reinforcement learning. We apply multiple importance sampling to
reduce the variance of our estimate and to address the issue of multi-modality
in the optimal proposal distribution. We demonstrate our approach on a control
task with both continuous and discrete actions spaces and show accuracy
improvements over several baselines
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