Monte Carlo theory, methods and examples
I have a book in progress on Monte Carlo, quasi-Monte Carlo and
Markov chain Monte Carlo. Several of the chapters are polished
enough to place here. I'm interested in comments especially about
errors or suggestions for references to include. There's no need
to point out busted links (?? in LaTeX) because the computer will
catch those for me when it is time to root out the last of them.
@book{mcbook,
   author = {Art B. Owen},
   year = 2013,
   title = {Monte Carlo theory, methods and examples},
   publisher = {\url{https://artowen.su.domains/mc/}}
}
Chapters 15, 16, 17 on quasi-Monte Carlo and randomized quasi-Monte Carlo have been updated as:
@book{practicalqmc,
   author = {Art B. Owen},
   year = 2023,
   title = {Practical Quasi-Monte Carlo Integration},
   publisher = {\url{https://artowen.su.domains/mc/practicalqmc.pdf}}
}
Copyright Art Owen, 2009-2013,2018-2019,2023.
Contents
- Introduction
- Simple Monte Carlo
- Uniform random numbers
- Non-uniform random numbers
- Random vectors and objects
- Processes
- Other integration methods
- Variance reduction
- Importance sampling
- Advanced variance reduction
- Markov chain Monte Carlo
- Gibbs sampler
- Adaptive and accelerated MCMC
- Sequential Monte Carlo
- Quasi-Monte Carlo
- Lattice rules
- Randomized quasi-Monte Carlo
Chapters 1 and 2
1 Introduction
- Example: traffic modeling
- Example: interpoint distances
- Notation
- Outline of the book
- End notes
- Exercises
2 Simple Monte Carlo
- Accuracy of simple Monte Carlo
- Error estimation
- Safely computing the standard error
- Estimating probabilities
- Estimating quantiles
- Random sample size
- When Monte Carlo fails
- Chebychev and Hoeffding intervals
- End notes
- Exercises
3 Uniform Random Numbers
- Random and pseudo-random numbers
- States, periods, seeds, and streams
- U(0,1) random variables
- Inside a random number generator
- Uniformity measures
- Statistical tests of random numbers
- Pairwise independent random numbers
- End notes
- Exercises
4 Non-uniform Random Numbers
- Inverting the CDF
- Examples of inversion
- Inversion for the normal distribution
- Inversion for discrete random variables
- Numerical inversion
- Other transformations
- Acceptance-rejection
- Gamma random variables
- Mixtures and automatic generators
- End notes
- Exercises
5 Random vectors and objects
- Generalizations of one-dimensional methods
- Multivariate normal and t
- Multinomial
- Dirichlet
- Multivariate Poisson and other distributions
- Copula-marginal sampling      
home made Gaussian copula
- Random points on the sphere
- Random matrices
- Example: classification error rates
- Random permutations
- Sampling without replacement
- Random graphs
- End notes
- Exercises
6 Processes
- Stochastic process definitions
- Discrete time random walks
- Gaussian processes
- Detailed simulation of Brownian motion
- Stochastic differential equations
- Non-Poisson point processes
- Dirichlet processes
- Discrete state, continuous time processes
- End notes
- Exercises
7 Other quadrature methods
- The midpoint rule
- Simpson's rule
- Higher order rules
- Fubini, Bahkvalov and the curse of dimensionality
- Hybrids with Monte Carlo
- Laplace approximations
- Weighted spaces and tractability
- Sparse grids
- End notes
- Exercises
8 Variance reduction
- Overview of variance reduction
- Antithetics
- Example: expected log return
- Stratification
- Example: stratified compound Poisson
- Common random numbers
- Conditioning
- Example: maximum Dirichlet
- Control variates
- Moment matching and reweighting
- End notes
- Exercises
9 Importance sampling
- Basic importance sampling
- Self-normalized importance sampling
- Importance sampling diagnostics
- Example: PERT
- Importance sampling versus acceptance-rejection
- Exponential tilting
- Modes and Hessians
- General variables and stochastic processes
- Control variates in importance sampling
- Mixture importance sampling
- Multiple importance sampling
- Positivisation
- What-if simulations
- End notes
- Exercises
10 Advanced variance reduction
- Grid-based stratification
- Stratification and antithetics
- Latin hypercube sampling
- Orthogonal array sampling
- Adaptive importance sampling
- Nonparametric AIS
- Generalized antithetic samplinlg
- Control variantes wtih antithetics and stratification
- Bridge, umbrella and path sampling
- End notes
- Exercises
11, 12 Two MCMC chapters
11 Markov chain Monte Carlo
- The need for MCMC
- Markov chains
- Detailed balance
- Metropolis-Hastings
- Random walk Metropolis
- Independence sampler
- Random disks revisited
- Ising revisited
- New proposals from old
- Burn-in
- Convergence diagnostics
- Error estimation
- Thinning
- End notes
- Exercises
12 Gibbs Sampler
- Stationary distribution for Gibbs
- Example: truncated normal
- Example: probit model
- Aperiodicity, irreducibility, detailed balance
- Correlated components
- Gibbs for mixture models
- Example: 10,000 galaxy velocities
- Label switching
- The slice sampler
- Thinning
- End notes
- Exercises
13 More MCMC methods
14 Some theory of MCMC
15,16,17 QMC and RQMC chapters (practical QMC)
15 Quasi-Monte Carlo
- Introduction to QMC
- Discrepancy measures
- Discrepancy rates
- The Koksma-Hlawka Inequality
- van der Corput and Halton sequences
- Example: the wing weight function
- Digital nets and sequences
- Effect of projections
- Example: synthetic integrands
- How digital constructions work
- Infinite variation
- Higher order nets
- Haar wavelets and Walsh functions
- Kronecker sequences
- End notes
- Exercises
16 Lattice rules
- Grid-based stratification
- Rank one lattices
- Example: wing weight revisited
- Lattices and lattice rules
- Quality criteria for lattices
- Convergence rates
- Periodizing transformations
- Lattice parameter search
- Embedded, extensible and shifted lattices
- Weighted spaces
- End notes
- Exercises
17 Randomized quasi-Monte Carlo
- Randomized quasi-Monte Carlo
- RQMC definitions and basic properties
- Effective dimension for RQMC
- Cranley-Patterson rotation and lattices
- Example: wing weight function
- Scrambled nets
- More scrambles
- Reducing effective dimension
- Example: valuing an Asian option
- Padding, hybrids and supercube sampling
- Randomized Halton sequences
- RQMC and variance reduction
- Singular integrands
- (R)QMC for MCMC
- Array-RQMC
- End notes
- Exercises
Appendix A:
The ANOVA decomposition of \([0,1]^d\)
- ANOVA for tabular data
- The functional ANOVA
- Orthogonalithy of ANOVA terms
- Best approximation by ANOVA
- Effective dimension
- Sobol' indices and mean dimension
- Anchored decompositions
- End notes
- Exercises