A survey of Monte Carlo methods for noisy and costly densities with application to reinforcement learning and ABC

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Llorente, F., Martino, L., Read, J., Delgado, D.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2021
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author Llorente, F.
Martino, L.
Read, J.
Delgado, D.
author_facet Llorente, F.
Martino, L.
Read, J.
Delgado, D.
contents This survey gives an overview of Monte Carlo methodologies using surrogate models, for dealing with densities which are intractable, costly, and/or noisy. This type of problem can be found in numerous real-world scenarios, including stochastic optimization and reinforcement learning, where each evaluation of a density function may incur some computationally-expensive or even physical (real-world activity) cost, likely to give different results each time. The surrogate model does not incur this cost, but there are important trade-offs and considerations involved in the choice and design of such methodologies. We classify the different methodologies into three main classes and describe specific instances of algorithms under a unified notation. A modular scheme which encompasses the considered methods is also presented. A range of application scenarios is discussed, with special attention to the likelihood-free setting and reinforcement learning. Several numerical comparisons are also provided.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2108_00490
institution arXiv
publishDate 2021
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A survey of Monte Carlo methods for noisy and costly densities with application to reinforcement learning and ABC
Llorente, F.
Martino, L.
Read, J.
Delgado, D.
Machine Learning
Computation
Methodology
This survey gives an overview of Monte Carlo methodologies using surrogate models, for dealing with densities which are intractable, costly, and/or noisy. This type of problem can be found in numerous real-world scenarios, including stochastic optimization and reinforcement learning, where each evaluation of a density function may incur some computationally-expensive or even physical (real-world activity) cost, likely to give different results each time. The surrogate model does not incur this cost, but there are important trade-offs and considerations involved in the choice and design of such methodologies. We classify the different methodologies into three main classes and describe specific instances of algorithms under a unified notation. A modular scheme which encompasses the considered methods is also presented. A range of application scenarios is discussed, with special attention to the likelihood-free setting and reinforcement learning. Several numerical comparisons are also provided.
title A survey of Monte Carlo methods for noisy and costly densities with application to reinforcement learning and ABC
topic Machine Learning
Computation
Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.00490