Combining Normalizing Flows and Quasi-Monte Carlo

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Andral, Charly
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866911755320426496
author Andral, Charly
author_facet Andral, Charly
contents Recent advances in machine learning have led to the development of new methods for enhancing Monte Carlo methods such as Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and importance sampling (IS). One such method is normalizing flows, which use a neural network to approximate a distribution by evaluating it pointwise. Normalizing flows have been shown to improve the performance of MCMC and IS. On the other side, (randomized) quasi-Monte Carlo methods are used to perform numerical integration. They replace the random sampling of Monte Carlo by a sequence which cover the hypercube more uniformly, resulting in better convergence rates for the error that plain Monte Carlo. In this work, we combine these two methods by using quasi-Monte Carlo to sample the initial distribution that is transported by the flow. We demonstrate through numerical experiments that this combination can lead to an estimator with significantly lower variance than if the flow was sampled with a classic Monte Carlo.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_05934
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Combining Normalizing Flows and Quasi-Monte Carlo
Andral, Charly
Computation
Machine Learning
Recent advances in machine learning have led to the development of new methods for enhancing Monte Carlo methods such as Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and importance sampling (IS). One such method is normalizing flows, which use a neural network to approximate a distribution by evaluating it pointwise. Normalizing flows have been shown to improve the performance of MCMC and IS. On the other side, (randomized) quasi-Monte Carlo methods are used to perform numerical integration. They replace the random sampling of Monte Carlo by a sequence which cover the hypercube more uniformly, resulting in better convergence rates for the error that plain Monte Carlo. In this work, we combine these two methods by using quasi-Monte Carlo to sample the initial distribution that is transported by the flow. We demonstrate through numerical experiments that this combination can lead to an estimator with significantly lower variance than if the flow was sampled with a classic Monte Carlo.
title Combining Normalizing Flows and Quasi-Monte Carlo
topic Computation
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.05934