Adaptive importance sampling on discrete Markov chains



The Annals of Applied Probability

Adaptive importance sampling on discrete Markov chains

Keith Baggerly, Dennis Cox, Craig Kollman, and Rick Picard

Source: Ann. Appl. Probab. Volume 9, Number 2 (1999), 391-412.

Abstract

In modeling particle transport through a medium, the path of a particle behaves as a transient Markov chain. We are interested in characteristics of the particle's movement conditional on its starting state, which take the form of a "score" accumulated with each transition. Importance sampling is an essential variance reduction technique in this setting, and we provide an adaptive (iteratively updated) importance sampling algorithm that converges exponentially to the solution. Examples illustrating this phenomenon are provided.

Primary Subjects: 65C05
Keywords: Adaptive procedures; exponential convergence; Monte Carlo; particle transport; zero-variance solution

Full-text: Open access

Links and Identifiers

Permanent link to this document: http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.aoap/1029962748
Mathematical Reviews number (MathSciNet): MR1687335
Digital Object Identifier: doi:10.1214/aoap/1029962748

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