English

On two ways to use determinantal point processes for Monte Carlo integration

Machine Learning 2026-04-22 v1 Statistics Theory Statistics Theory

Abstract

The standard Monte Carlo estimator I^NMC\widehat{I}_N^{\mathrm{MC}} of fdω\int fd\omega relies on independent samples from ω\omega and has variance of order 1/N1/N. Replacing the samples with a determinantal point process (DPP), a repulsive distribution, makes the estimator consistent, with variance rates that depend on how the DPP is adapted to ff and ω\omega. We examine two existing DPP-based estimators: one by Bardenet & Hardy (2020) with a rate of O(N(1+1/d))\mathcal{O}(N^{-(1+1/d)}) for smooth ff, but relying on a fixed DPP. The other, by Ermakov & Zolotukhin (1960), is unbiased with rate of order 1/N1/N, like Monte Carlo, but its DPP is tailored to ff. We revisit these estimators, generalize them to continuous settings, and provide sampling algorithms.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.19698,
  title  = {On two ways to use determinantal point processes for Monte Carlo integration},
  author = {Guillaume Gautier and Rémi Bardenet and Michal Valko},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.19698},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

NeurIPS 2019

R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:28:49.041Z