Monte Carlo simulations are a classical tool to analyse physical systems. When unlikely events are to be simulated, the importance sampling technique is often used instead of Monte Carlo. Importance sampling has some drawbacks when the problem dimensionality is high or when the optimal importance sampling density is complex to obtain. In this paper, we focus on a quite novel but somehow confidential alternative to importance sampling called importance splitting.
International audienceVarious reliability or hedging problems boil down to quantile estimation. However, real-life systems are usually multidimensional and thus often imply multidimensional density minimum volume set estimation which is usually done with Monte Carlo simulations. Increasing safety standards create a need for density minimum volume set estimation with low probability that crude Monte Carlo cannot fulfil. This paper proposes a new importance sampling algorithm that estimates efficiently multidimensional density minimum volume sets for extreme probability. It also presents some numerical results on a simple bidimensional Gaussian case and on a realistic launcher impact safety zone estimation
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.