Related papers: Approximate and integrate: Variance reduction in M…
Owing to their favorable scaling with dimensionality, Monte Carlo (MC) methods have become the tool of choice for numerical integration across the quantitative sciences. Almost invariably, efficient MC integration schemes are strictly…
The theme of the present paper is numerical integration of $C^r$ functions using randomized methods. We consider variance reduction methods that consist in two steps. First the initial interval is partitioned into subintervals and the…
Monte Carlo integration is a commonly used technique to compute intractable integrals and is typically thought to perform poorly for very high-dimensional integrals. To show that this is not always the case, we examine Monte Carlo…
The classical approaches to numerically integrating a function $f$ are Monte Carlo (MC) and quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) methods. MC methods use random samples to evaluate $f$ and have error $O(\sigma(f)/\sqrt{n})$, where $\sigma(f)$ is the…
We study the feature-scaled version of the Monte Carlo algorithm with linear function approximation. This algorithm converges to a scale-invariant solution, which is not unduly affected by states having feature vectors with large norms. The…
This paper concerns the approximation of smooth, high-dimensional functions from limited samples using polynomials. This task lies at the heart of many applications in computational science and engineering - notably, some of those arising…
Monte Carlo (MC) and Quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) methods are classical approaches for the numerical integration of functions $f$ over $[0,1]^d$. While QMC methods can achieve faster convergence rates than MC in moderate dimensions, their…
Monte Carlo methods represent the "de facto" standard for approximating complicated integrals involving multidimensional target distributions. In order to generate random realizations from the target distribution, Monte Carlo techniques use…
Recent advances in machine learning have led to the development of new methods for enhancing Monte Carlo methods such as Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and importance sampling (IS). One such method is normalizing flows, which use a neural…
We study an optimal control problem under uncertainty, where the target function is the solution of an elliptic partial differential equation with random coefficients, steered by a control function. The robust formulation of the…
We motive and calculate Newton--Cotes quadrature integration variance and compare it directly with Monte Carlo (MC) integration variance. We find an equivalence between deterministic quadrature sampling and random MC sampling by noting that…
We propose a methodology for computing single and multi-asset European option prices, and more generally expectations of scalar functions of (multivariate) random variables. This new approach combines the ability of Monte Carlo simulation…
We compare the integration error of Monte Carlo (MC) and quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) methods for approximating the normalizing constant of posterior distributions and certain marginal likelihoods. In doing so, we characterize the dependency of…
Monte Carlo (MC) sampling algorithms are an extremely widely-used technique to estimate expectations of functions f(x), especially in high dimensions. Control variates are a very powerful technique to reduce the error of such estimates, but…
Many machine learning problems involve Monte Carlo gradient estimators. As a prominent example, we focus on Monte Carlo variational inference (MCVI) in this paper. The performance of MCVI crucially depends on the variance of its stochastic…
Monte Carlo (MC) techniques are often used to estimate integrals of a multivariate function using randomly generated samples of the function. In light of the increasing interest in uncertainty quantification and robust design applications…
Adaptive Monte Carlo methods are very efficient techniques designed to tune simulation estimators on-line. In this work, we present an alternative to stochastic approximation to tune the optimal change of measure in the context of…
This paper investigates a class of algorithms for numerical integration of a function in d dimensions over a compact domain by Monte Carlo methods. We construct a histogram approximation to the function using a partition of the integration…
In this review, we address the use of Monte Carlo methods for approximating definite integrals of the form $Z = \int L(x) d P(x)$, where $L$ is a target function (often a likelihood) and $P$ a finite measure. We present vertical-likelihood…
We propose a novel sampling framework for inference in probabilistic models: an active learning approach that converges more quickly (in wall-clock time) than Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) benchmarks. The central challenge in…