Abstract This paper is a contemporary review of quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) methods, that is, equal-weight rules for the approximate evaluation of high-dimensional integrals over the unit cube [0,1] s . It first introduces the by-now standard setting of weighted Hilbert spaces of functions with square-integrable mixed first derivatives, and then indicates alternative settings, such as non-Hilbert spaces, that can sometimes be more suitable. Original contributions include the extension of the fast component-by-component (CBC) construction of lattice rules that achieve the optimal convergence order (a rate of almost 1/ N , where N is the number of points, independently of dimension) to so-called “product and order dependent” (POD) weights, as seen in some recent applications. Although the paper has a strong focus on lattice rules, the function space settings are applicable to all QMC methods. Furthermore, the error analysis and construction of lattice rules can be adapted to polynomial lattice rules from the family of digital nets.
Abstract This paper is a contemporary review of quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) methods, that is, equal-weight rules for the approximate evaluation of high-dimensional integrals over the unit cube [0,1] s . It first introduces the by-now standard setting of weighted Hilbert spaces of functions with square-integrable mixed first derivatives, and then indicates alternative settings, such as non-Hilbert spaces, that can sometimes be more suitable. Original contributions include the extension of the fast component-by-component (CBC) construction of lattice rules that achieve the optimal convergence order (a rate of almost 1/ N , where N is the number of points, independently of dimension) to so-called “product and order dependent” (POD) weights, as seen in some recent applications. Although the paper has a strong focus on lattice rules, the function space settings are applicable to all QMC methods. Furthermore, the error analysis and construction of lattice rules can be adapted to polynomial lattice rules from the family of digital nets.
This paper is a contemporary review of quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) methods, that is, equal-weight rules for the approximate evaluation of high-dimensional integrals over the unit cube [0,1]s. It first introduces the by-now standard setting of weighted Hilbert spaces of functions with square-integrable mixed first derivatives, and then indicates alternative settings, such as non-Hilbert spaces, that can sometimes be more suitable. Original contributions include the extension of the fast component-by-component (CBC) construction of lattice rules that achieve the optimal convergence order (a rate of almost 1/N, where N is the number of points, independently of dimension) to so-called “product and order dependent” (POD) weights, as seen in some recent applications. Although the paper has a strong focus on lattice rules, the function space settings are applicable to all QMC methods. Furthermore, the error analysis and construction of lattice rules can be adapted to polynomial lattice rules from the family of digital nets. doi:10.1017/S1446181112000077
This paper is a contemporary review of QMC (‘quasi-Monte Carlo’) methods, that is, equal-weight rules for the approximate evaluation of high-dimensional integrals over the unit cube [0,1] s , where s may be large, or even infinite. After a general introduction, the paper surveys recent developments in lattice methods, digital nets, and related themes. Among those recent developments are methods of construction of both lattices and digital nets, to yield QMC rules that have a prescribed rate of convergence for sufficiently smooth functions, and ideally also guaranteed slow growth (or no growth) of the worst-case error as s increases. A crucial role is played by parameters called ‘weights’, since a careful use of the weight parameters is needed to ensure that the worst-case errors in an appropriately weighted function space are bounded, or grow only slowly, as the dimension s increases. Important tools for the analysis are weighted function spaces, reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces, and discrepancy, all of which are discussed with an appropriate level of detail.
Abstract. We present an extension of the convergence analysis for Richardson-extrapolated polynomial lattice rules from [J. Dick, T. Goda, and T. Yoshiki, SIAM J. Numer. Anal., 57 (2019), pp. 44–69] for high-dimensional, numerical integration to classes of integrand functions with quantified smoothness and quasi–Monte Carlo (QMC) integration rules with so-called smoothness-driven, product and order dependent (SPOD) weights. We establish in particular sufficient conditions for the existence of an asymptotic expansion of the QMC integration error with respect to suitable powers of N, the number of QMC integration nodes. We derive a dimension-separated criterion for a fast component-by-component (CBC) construction algorithm for the computation of the QMC generating vector with quadratic scaling with respect to the integration dimension s. We prove that the proposed QMC integration strategies (a) are free from the curse of dimensionality, (b) afford higher-order convergence rates subject to suitable summability conditions on the QMC weights, (c) allow for certain classes of high-dimensional integrand functions a computable, asymptotically exact numerical estimate of the QMC quadrature error, with reliability and efficiency independent of the dimension of the integration domain, and (d) accommodate fast, FFT-based matrix-vector multiplication from [J. Dick, F. Y. Kuo, Q. T. Le Gia, C. Schwab, SIAM J. Sci. Comput., 37 (2015), pp. A1436–A1450] when applied to parametric operator equations. The integration methods are applicable for large classes of many-parametric integrand functions with quantified parametric smoothness. We verify all hypotheses and present numerical examples arising from the Galerkin finite-element discretization of a model linear parametric elliptic PDE illustrating (a)–(d). We verify computationally the scaling of the fast CBC construction algorithm with SPOD QMC weights and examine the extrapolation-based a posteriori numerical estimation of the QMC quadrature error. We find in examples with parameter spaces of dimension s = 10, …, 128 that the extrapolation-based, computable QMC integration error indicator has an efficiency index between 0.9 and 1.1 for a moderate number N of QMC points.
Quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) methods are equal weight quadrature rules to approximate integrals over the unit cube with respect to the uniform measure. In this paper we discuss QMC integration with respect to general product measures defined on an arbitrary cube. We only require that the cumulative distribution function is invertible. We develop a worst-case error bound and study the dependence of the error on the number of points and the dimension for digital nets and sequences as well as polynomial lattice point sets, which are mapped to the domain using the inverse cumulative distribution function. We do not require any smoothness properties of the probability density function and the worst-case error does not depend on the particular choice of density function and its smoothness. The component-by-component construction of polynomial lattice rules is based on a criterion which depends only on the size of the cube but is otherwise independent of the product measure.
Recently, quasi-Monte Carlo methods have been successfully used for approximating multiple integrals in hundreds of dimensions in mathematical finance, and were significantly more efficient than Monte Carlo methods. To understand the apparent success of quasi-Monte Carlo methods for multiple integration, one popular approach is to study worst-case error bounds in weighted function spaces in which the importance of the variables is moderated by some sequences of weights. Ideally, a family of quasi-Monte Carlo methods in some weighted function space should be strongly tractable. Strong tractability means that the minimal number of quadrature points n needed to reduce the initial error by a factor of ε is bounded by a polynomial in ε⁻¹ independently of the dimension d. Several recent publications show the existence of lattice rules that satisfy the strong tractability error bounds in weighted Korobov spaces of periodic integrands and weighted Sobolev spaces of non-periodic integrands. However, those results were non-constructive and thus give no clues as to how to actually construct these lattice rules. In this thesis, we focus on the construction of quasi-Monte Carlo methods that are strongly tractable. We develop and justify algorithms for the construction of lattice rules that achieve strong tractability error bounds in weighted Korobov and Sobolev spaces. The parameters characterizing these lattice rules are found ‘component-by-component’: the (d + 1)-th components are obtained by successive 1-dimensional searches, with the previous d components kept unchanged. The cost of these algorithms vary from O(nd²) to O(n³d²) operations. With currently available technology, they allow construction of rules easily with values of n up to several million and dimensions d up to several hundred.
High-dimensional integrals arise in a variety of areas, including quantum physics, the physics and chemistry of molecules, statistical mechanics and more recently, in financial applications. In order to approximate multidimensional integrals, one may use Monte Carlo methods in which the quadrature points are generated randomly or quasi-Monte Carlo methods, in which points are generated deterministically. One particular class of quasi-Monte Carlo methods for multivariate integration is represented by lattice rules. Lattice rules constructed throughout this thesis allow good approximations to integrals of functions belonging to certain weighted function spaces. These function spaces were proposed as an explanation as to why integrals in many variables appear to be successfully approximated although the standard theory indicates that the number of quadrature points required for reasonable accuracy would be astronomical because of the large number of variables. The purpose of this thesis is to contribute to theoretical results regarding the construction of lattice rules for multiple integration. We consider both lattice rules for integrals over the unit cube and lattice rules suitable for integrals over Euclidean space. The research reported throughout the thesis is devoted to finding the generating vector required to produce lattice rules that have what is termed a low weighted discrepancy . In simple terms, the discrepancy is a measure of the uniformity of the distribution of the quadrature points or in other settings, a worst-case error. One of the assumptions used in these weighted function spaces is that variables are arranged in the decreasing order of their importance and the assignment of weights in this situation results in so-called product weights . In other applications it is rather the importance of group of variables that matters. This situation is modelled by using function spaces in which the weights are general . In the weighted settings mentioned above, the quality of the lattice rules is assessed by the weighted discrepancy mentioned earlier. Under appropriate conditions on the weights, the lattice rules constructed here produce a convergence rate of the error that ranges from O(n−1/2) to the (believed) optimal O(n−1+δ) for any δ gt 0, with the involved constant independent of the dimension.