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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Kinnear, Hugh J., DiazDelaO, F. A.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.06417
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Table of Contents:
  • This paper proposes niching importance sampling, a framework that combines concepts from reliability analysis, e.g. Markov chains, importance sampling, and relative cross entropy minimisation, with niching techniques from evolutionary multi-modal optimisation. The result is a highly robust estimator of the probability of failure, that can tackle sampling challenges posed by the underlying geometry of a reliability problem. Niching importance sampling is tested on a range of numerical examples and is shown to consistently avoid the degenerate behaviour observed for existing reliability methods on several multi-modal performance functions.