A Matlab Program for Testing Quasi-Monte Carlo Constructions

Lynne Serré

Published Jan 1, 2010• 3 citations

Abstract

The Monte Carlo method uses a random sample of size n to approximate the value of an s-dimensional integral and has a convergence rate of O(n−1/2). By using lowdiscrepancy sampling, the quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) method achieves a convergence rate of O(n−1(log n)), which is asymptotically faster than that of the Monte Carlo method. However, due to the dependence of the QMC error bound on the dimension s, this result doesn’t hold at practical values of n for even relatively small values of s. Still, many empirical studies have shown that QMC can outperform Monte Carlo integration in highdimensional problems at practical values of n. Empirical studies are often conducted by researchers to investigate the behaviour of QMC methods since the QMC error bound suffers from several practical limitations. This paper presents a Matlab program that implements some of the more commonly used numerical tests and provides a simple graphical summary of the results.

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