Blanchet, J.H., Leder, K., Glynn, P.W. (2009). Efficient Simulation of Light-Tailed Sums: an Old-Folk Song Sung to a Faster New Tune…. In: L’ Ecuyer, P., Owen, A. (eds) Monte Carlo and Quasi-Monte Carlo Methods 2008. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04107-5_13
Abstract
We revisit a classical problem in rare-event simulation, namely, efficient estimation of the probability that the sample mean of n independent identically distributed light tailed (i.e. with finite moment generating function in a neighborhood of the origin) random variables lies in a sufficiently regular closed convex set that does not contain their mean. It is well known that the optimal exponential tilting (OET), although logarithmically efficient, is not strongly efficient (typically, the squared coefficient of variation of the estimator grows at rate n 1/2). After discussing some important differences between the optimal change of measure and OET (for instance, in the one dimensional case the size of the overshoot is bounded for the optimal importance sampler and of order O(n 1/2) for OET) that indicate why OET is not strongly efficient, we provide a state-dependent importance sampling that can be proved to …
Authors
Jose H Blanchet, Kevin Leder, Peter W Glynn
Publication date
2009/11/17
Book
Monte Carlo and Quasi-Monte Carlo Methods 2008
Pages
227-248
Publisher
Springer Berlin Heidelberg
