Given sample data, how do you calculate the value of a parameter? While this question is impossible to answer, it is frequently encountered in statistics classes when students are introduced to the distinction between a sample and a population (or between a statistic and a parameter). It is not uncommon for teachers of statistics to also confuse…

Monte Carlo simulations are a classical tool to analyse physical systems. When unlikely events are to be simulated, the importance sampling technique is often used instead of Monte Carlo. Importance sampling has some drawbacks when the problem dimensionality is high or when the optimal importance sampling density is complex to obtain. In this…