Importance sampling in path space for diffusion processes with slow-fast variables

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Abstract: Importance sampling is a widely used technique to reduce the variance of a Monte Carlo estimator by an appropriate change of measure. In this work, we study importance sam- pling in the framework of diffusion process and consider the change of measure which is realized by adding a control force to the original dynamics. For certain exponential type expectation, the corresponding control force of the optimal change of measure leads to a zero-variance estimator and is related to the solution of a Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellmann equation. We focus on certain diffu- sions with both slow and fast variables, and the main result is that we obtain an upper bound of the relative error for the importance sampling estimators with control obtained from the limiting dynamics. We demonstrate our approximation strategy with an illustrative numerical example.


Monte Carlo simulations can be improved by a change of measure that insures that the ``important region in the state space is sampled more frequently. This technique is called importance sampling. In this paper, this technique is studied for the path sampling problem for diffusion processes. The samples are drawn from a modified SDE to which a control force is added that drives the dynamics to the important regions in state space. The authors restrict their attention to certain exponential path functionals, for which an optimal change of measure exists (which can be found by solving a Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellmann (HJB) equation) that admits an importance sampling estimator with zero variance. They consider diffusions with both slow and fast variables and their main results is an upper bound for the relative error of the importance sampling estimators with control obtained from the limiting dynamics. Under certain assumptions and for small \(\varepsilon\), the relative error is bounded by \(C\varepsilon^{1/8}\), see Theorem 3.1. A numerical example is provided and some algorithmic issues related to the calculation of the suboptimal control force are discussion. As a secondary contribution, the authors also obtain several error estimates for approximation of the original process by the limiting process.



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