This survey gives an overview of the use of importance, an adjoint of light, in speeding up rendering. The importance of a light distribution indicates its contribution to the region of most interest—typically the directly visible parts of a scene. Importance can therefore be used to concentrate global illumination and ray tracing calculations where they matter most for image accuracy, while re...

When observations are incomplete or data are missing, approximate inference methods based on importance sampling are often used. Unfortunately, when the target and proposal distributions are dissimilar, the sampling procedure leads to biased estimates or requires a prohibitive number of samples. Our method approximates a multivariate target distribution by sampling from an existing, sequential ...

Septal turbinate refers to a widened region of the septum located superior to the inferior turbinates and anterior to the middle turbinates. Although a common anatomical variant, its significance is not well reported. We report a 56-year-old Malay man who presented with a three year history of chronic nasal obstruction secondary to septal turbinate and type II deviated nasal septum. His nasal s...

The theory of competing causes involves assessing a cause of failure, such as death due to heart disease or cancer, in the presence of other competing causes. In this paper, we develop a fundamental economic model for examining the degree and order of importance in a competing cause framework. In particular, we demonstrate the usefulness of Von Neumann-Morgenstern utility theory in economics by...

The performance of many machine learning methods depends critically on hyperparameter settings. Sophisticated Bayesian optimization methods have recently achieved considerable successes in optimizing these hyperparameters, in several cases surpassing the performance of human experts. However, blind reliance on such methods can leave end users without insight into the relative importance of diff...

Monte Carlo simulation (MCS) is a useful tool for computation of probability of failure in reliability analysis. However, the large number of samples, often required for acceptable accuracy, makes it time-consuming. Importance sampling is a method on the basis of MCS which has been proposed to reduce the computational time of MCS. In this paper, a new adaptive importance sampling-based algorith...