A fundamental problem in signal processing is the estimation of unknown parameters or functions from noisy observations. Important examples include localization of objects in wireless sensor networks [1] and the Internet of Things [2]; multiple source reconstruction from electroencephalograms [3]; estimation of power spectral density for speech enhancement [4]; or inference in genomic signal processing [5]. Within the Bayesian signal processing framework, these problems are addressed by constructing posterior probability distributions of the unknowns. The posteriors combine optimally all of the information about the unknowns in the observations with the information that is present in their prior probability distributions. Given the posterior, one often wants to make inference about the unknowns, e.g., if we are estimating parameters, finding the values that maximize their posterior or the values that minimize some cost function given the uncertainty of the parameters. Unfortunately, obtaining closed-form solutions to these types of problems is infeasible in most practical applications, and therefore, developing approximate inference techniques is of utmost interest.

Importance sampling (IS) methods are broadly used to approximate posterior distributions or their moments. In the standard IS approach, samples are drawn from a single proposal distribution and weighted adequately. However, since the performance in IS depends on the mismatch between the targeted and the proposal distributions, several proposal densities are often employed for the generation of samples. Under this multiple importance sampling (MIS) scenario, extensive literature has addressed the selection and adaptation of the proposal distributions, interpreting the sampling and weighting steps in different ways. In this paper, we establish a novel general framework with sampling and weighting procedures when more than one proposal is available. The new framework encompasses most relevant MIS schemes in the literature, and novel valid schemes appear naturally. All the MIS schemes are compared and ranked in terms of the variance of the associated estimators. Finally, we provide illustrative examples revealing that, even with a good choice of the proposal densities, a careful interpretation of the sampling and weighting procedures can make a significant difference in the performance of the method.