We propose a Dynamic Programming (DP) approach for pricing options embedded in bonds, the focus being on call and put options with advance notice. An efficient procedure is developed for the cases where the interest-rate process follows the Vasicek, Cox-Ingersoll-Ross (CIR), or generalized...

The Cross Entropy method is a well-known adaptive importance sampling method for rare-event probability estimation, which requires estimating an optimal importance sampling density within a parametric class. In this article we estimate an optimal importance sampling density within a wider...

In this paper we describe a Sequential Importance Sampling (SIS) procedure for counting the number of vertex covers in general graphs. The performance of SIS depends heavily on how close the SIS proposal distribution is to a uniform one over a suitably restricted set. The proposed algorithm...