A New Fast Simulation Technique for Rare Event Simulation

Importance Sampling (IS) has been applied to accelerate the occurrence of rare events. However, it has a drawback of effective biasing scheme to make the estimator from IS unbiased. Adaptive Importance Sampling (AIS) employs an estimated sampling distribution of IS to the systems of interest during the course of simulation. We propose Nonparametric Adaptive Importance Sampling (NAIS) technique which is nonparametrically modified version of AIS and test it to estimate a probability of rare event in M/M/1 queueing model. Comparing with classical Monte Carlo simulation, the computational efficiency and variance reductions gained via NAIS are substantial. A possible extension of NAIS regarding with random number generation is also discussed.