Infinite Swapping using IID Samples

Abstract

We propose a new method for estimating rare event probabilities when independent samples are available. It is assumed that the underlying probability measures satisfy a large deviations principle with a scaling parameter $\varepsilon$ that we call temperature. We show how by combining samples at different temperatures, one can construct an estimator with greatly reduced variance. Although as presented here the method is not as broadly applicable as other rare event simulation methods, such as splitting or importance sampling, it does not require any problem-dependent constructions.