9,093 research outputs found

    Improved Sequential Stopping Rule for Monte Carlo Simulation

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    This paper presents an improved result on the negative-binomial Monte Carlo technique analyzed in a previous paper for the estimation of an unknown probability p. Specifically, the confidence level associated to a relative interval [p/\mu_2, p\mu_1], with \mu_1, \mu_2 > 1, is proved to exceed its asymptotic value for a broader range of intervals than that given in the referred paper, and for any value of p. This extends the applicability of the estimator, relaxing the conditions that guarantee a given confidence level.Comment: 2 figures. Paper accepted in IEEE Transactions on Communication

    Sequential Monte Carlo pricing of American-style options under stochastic volatility models

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    We introduce a new method to price American-style options on underlying investments governed by stochastic volatility (SV) models. The method does not require the volatility process to be observed. Instead, it exploits the fact that the optimal decision functions in the corresponding dynamic programming problem can be expressed as functions of conditional distributions of volatility, given observed data. By constructing statistics summarizing information about these conditional distributions, one can obtain high quality approximate solutions. Although the required conditional distributions are in general intractable, they can be arbitrarily precisely approximated using sequential Monte Carlo schemes. The drawback, as with many Monte Carlo schemes, is potentially heavy computational demand. We present two variants of the algorithm, one closely related to the well-known least-squares Monte Carlo algorithm of Longstaff and Schwartz [The Review of Financial Studies 14 (2001) 113-147], and the other solving the same problem using a "brute force" gridding approach. We estimate an illustrative SV model using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods for three equities. We also demonstrate the use of our algorithm by estimating the posterior distribution of the market price of volatility risk for each of the three equities.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/09-AOAS286 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

    Bayesian subset simulation

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    We consider the problem of estimating a probability of failure α\alpha, defined as the volume of the excursion set of a function f:X⊆Rd→Rf:\mathbb{X} \subseteq \mathbb{R}^{d} \to \mathbb{R} above a given threshold, under a given probability measure on X\mathbb{X}. In this article, we combine the popular subset simulation algorithm (Au and Beck, Probab. Eng. Mech. 2001) and our sequential Bayesian approach for the estimation of a probability of failure (Bect, Ginsbourger, Li, Picheny and Vazquez, Stat. Comput. 2012). This makes it possible to estimate α\alpha when the number of evaluations of ff is very limited and α\alpha is very small. The resulting algorithm is called Bayesian subset simulation (BSS). A key idea, as in the subset simulation algorithm, is to estimate the probabilities of a sequence of excursion sets of ff above intermediate thresholds, using a sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) approach. A Gaussian process prior on ff is used to define the sequence of densities targeted by the SMC algorithm, and drive the selection of evaluation points of ff to estimate the intermediate probabilities. Adaptive procedures are proposed to determine the intermediate thresholds and the number of evaluations to be carried out at each stage of the algorithm. Numerical experiments illustrate that BSS achieves significant savings in the number of function evaluations with respect to other Monte Carlo approaches

    Markov Chain Monte Carlo: Can We Trust the Third Significant Figure?

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    Current reporting of results based on Markov chain Monte Carlo computations could be improved. In particular, a measure of the accuracy of the resulting estimates is rarely reported. Thus we have little ability to objectively assess the quality of the reported estimates. We address this issue in that we discuss why Monte Carlo standard errors are important, how they can be easily calculated in Markov chain Monte Carlo and how they can be used to decide when to stop the simulation. We compare their use to a popular alternative in the context of two examples.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/08-STS257 the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

    Nonanticipating estimation applied to sequential analysis and changepoint detection

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    Suppose a process yields independent observations whose distributions belong to a family parameterized by \theta\in\Theta. When the process is in control, the observations are i.i.d. with a known parameter value \theta_0. When the process is out of control, the parameter changes. We apply an idea of Robbins and Siegmund [Proc. Sixth Berkeley Symp. Math. Statist. Probab. 4 (1972) 37-41] to construct a class of sequential tests and detection schemes whereby the unknown post-change parameters are estimated. This approach is especially useful in situations where the parametric space is intricate and mixture-type rules are operationally or conceptually difficult to formulate. We exemplify our approach by applying it to the problem of detecting a change in the shape parameter of a Gamma distribution, in both a univariate and a multivariate setting.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/009053605000000183 in the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

    New Insights into History Matching via Sequential Monte Carlo

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    The aim of the history matching method is to locate non-implausible regions of the parameter space of complex deterministic or stochastic models by matching model outputs with data. It does this via a series of waves where at each wave an emulator is fitted to a small number of training samples. An implausibility measure is defined which takes into account the closeness of simulated and observed outputs as well as emulator uncertainty. As the waves progress, the emulator becomes more accurate so that training samples are more concentrated on promising regions of the space and poorer parts of the space are rejected with more confidence. Whilst history matching has proved to be useful, existing implementations are not fully automated and some ad-hoc choices are made during the process, which involves user intervention and is time consuming. This occurs especially when the non-implausible region becomes small and it is difficult to sample this space uniformly to generate new training points. In this article we develop a sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithm for implementation which is semi-automated. Our novel SMC approach reveals that the history matching method yields a non-implausible distribution that can be multi-modal, highly irregular and very difficult to sample uniformly. Our SMC approach offers a much more reliable sampling of the non-implausible space, which requires additional computation compared to other approaches used in the literature

    Patterns of Scalable Bayesian Inference

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    Datasets are growing not just in size but in complexity, creating a demand for rich models and quantification of uncertainty. Bayesian methods are an excellent fit for this demand, but scaling Bayesian inference is a challenge. In response to this challenge, there has been considerable recent work based on varying assumptions about model structure, underlying computational resources, and the importance of asymptotic correctness. As a result, there is a zoo of ideas with few clear overarching principles. In this paper, we seek to identify unifying principles, patterns, and intuitions for scaling Bayesian inference. We review existing work on utilizing modern computing resources with both MCMC and variational approximation techniques. From this taxonomy of ideas, we characterize the general principles that have proven successful for designing scalable inference procedures and comment on the path forward
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