Decomposition of some weil-known variance reduction techniques ^†

^†Research partially supported by Office of Naval Research contract N00014-79-C-0832.

Abstract

Proliferation of techniques and lack of unifying structure have hindred both study and application of variance reduction. We view any variance reduction technique (VRT) as a transformation from one experiment to another, which leads to an exhaustive taxonomy of VRTs. In this paper, seven familiar VRTs are expressed in our taxonomy as compositions of elemental transformations from six basic classes. Our objective is to use the reader's knowledge of these well-known techniques to illustrate the taxonomy.

Keywords:

• Antithetic variates
• common random numbers
• conditional expectations
• control variates
• importance sampling
• Monte Carlo
• poststratified sampling
• simulation
• swindles
• variance reduction

^†Research partially supported by Office of Naval Research contract N00014-79-C-0832.

^†Research partially supported by Office of Naval Research contract N00014-79-C-0832.

Notes

^†Research partially supported by Office of Naval Research contract N00014-79-C-0832.