Importance sampling is a powerful and pervasive technique in statistics, machine learning, and randomized algorithms.

Basics

Importance sampling is a technique for estimating the expectation \(\mu\) of a random variable \(f(x)\) under distribution \(p\) from samples of a different distribution \(q.\)

The key observation is that \(\mu\) can be expressed as the expectation of a different random variable \(f^*(x)=\frac{p(x)}{q(x)}\! \cdot\! f(x)\) under \(q.\)

Technical condition: \(q\) must have support everywhere \(p\) does, \(f(x) p(x) > 0 \Rightarrow q(x) > 0.\) Without this condition, the equation is biased! Note: \(q\) can support things that \(p\) doesn't.

Terminology: The quantity \(w(x) = \frac{p(x)}{q(x)}\) is often referred to as the importance weight or importance correction. We often refer to \(p\) as the target density and \(q\) as the proposal density.

Now, given samples \(\{ x^{(i)} \}_{i=1}^{n}\) from \(q,\) we can use the Monte Carlo estimate, \(\hat{\mu} \approx \frac{1}{n} \sum_{i=1}^n f^{*}(x^{(i)}),\) as an unbiased estimator of \(\mu.\)

Remarks

There are a few reasons we might want to use importance sampling:

1. Convenience: It might be trickier to sample directly from \(p.\)

2. Bias-correction: Suppose we're developing an algorithm that requires samples to satisfy some safety condition (e.g., a minimum support threshold) and be unbiased. Importance sampling can be used to remove bias while satisfying the condition.

3. Variance reduction: It might be the case that sampling directly from \(p\) would require more samples to estimate \(\mu.\) Check out these great notes for more.

4. Off-policy evaluation and learning: We might want to collect some exploratory data from \(q\) and evaluate different policies \(p\) (e.g., to pick the best one). Here's a link to a future post on [off-policy evaluation and counterfactual reasoning (https://timvieira.github.io/blog/post/2016/12/19/counterfactual-reasoning-and-learning-from-logged-data/) and some cool papers: counterfactual reasoning, reinforcement learning, contextual bandits, domain adaptation.

There are a few common cases for \(q\) worth separate consideration:

1. Control over \(q\): This is the case in experimental design, variance reduction, active learning, and reinforcement learning. It's often difficult to design \(q,\) which results in an estimator with reasonable variance. A very difficult case is in off-policy evaluation because it (essentially) requires a good exploratory distribution for every possible policy. (I have much more to say on this topic.)

2. Little to no control over \(q\): For example, you're given some dataset (e.g., new articles), and you want to estimate performance on a different dataset (e.g., Twitter).

3. Unknown \(q\): In this case, we want to estimate \(q\) (typically referred to as the propensity score) and use it in the importance sampling estimator. As far as I can tell, this technique is widely used to remove selection bias when estimating the effects of different treatments.

Drawbacks: The main drawback of importance sampling is variance. A few bad samples with large weights can drastically throw off the estimator. Thus, it's often the case that a biased estimator is preferred, e.g., estimating the partition function, clipping weights, indirect importance sampling. A secondary drawback is that both densities must be normalized, which is often intractable.

What's next? I plan to cover variance reduction and off-policy evaluation in more detail in future posts.