Importance Sampling for the Empirical Measure of Weakly Interacting Diffusions

Abstract

We construct an importance sampling method for computing statistics related to rare events for weakly interacting diffusions. Standard Monte Carlo methods behave exponentially poorly with the number of particles in the system for such problems. Our scheme is based on subsolutions of a Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation on Wasserstein space which arises in the theory of mean-field (McKean-Vlasov) control. We identify conditions under which such a scheme is asymptotically optimal. In the process, we make connections between the large deviations principle for the empirical measure of weakly interacting diffusions, mean-field control, and the HJB equation on Wasserstein space. We also provide evidence, both analytical and numerical, that with sufficient regularity of the HJB equation, our scheme can have vanishingly small relative error in the many particle limit.