Importance sampling for the empirical measure of weakly interacting diffusions

From MaRDI portal



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.


In the setting of a weakly interacting particle system, the authors detail a control-based importance sampling scheme for estimation of statistics of the form \[ \mathbb{E}\left[\exp\left\{-NG\left(\mu_T\right)\right\}\right]\,, \] where \(\mu_T\) is the empirical measure of the particles at the terminal time \(T\), there are \(N\) particles in total, and \(G\) is an appropriate function. This involves defining a suitably controlled version of the underlying system, and using statistics from this controlled system to estimate quantities of interest for the original system with reduced variance for large \(N\). Suitable controls are given using a zero-viscosity Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation on a Wasserstein space. One of the main results of the present paper is that, under certain assumptions (including boundedness and continuity of coefficients, and existence and uniqueness of solutions) for a bounded and continuous function \(G\), this procedure requires only a subexponential number of samples to achieve a given relative error as \(N\to\infty\). Under stronger assumptions, the number of samples required vanishes in the limit, so that a single sample suffices for large \(N\) in some situations. These results are complemented by explicit consideration of some linear-quadratic examples in which the HJB equation can be solved analytically, and by numerical results.



Cites work









This page was built for publication: Importance sampling for the empirical measure of weakly interacting diffusions

Report a bug (only for logged in users!)Click here to report a bug for this page (MaRDI item Q6142541)