  We consider the problem of estimating an expected outcome from a stochastic
simulation model. Our goal is to develop a theoretical framework on importance
sampling for such estimation. By investigating the variance of an importance
sampling estimator, we propose a two-stage procedure that involves a regression
stage and a sampling stage to construct the final estimator. We introduce a
parametric and a nonparametric regression estimator in the first stage and
study how the allocation between the two stages affects the performance of the
final estimator. We analyze the variance reduction rates and derive oracle
properties of both methods. We evaluate the empirical performances of the
methods using two numerical examples and a case study on wind turbine
reliability evaluation.
