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The Gelman-Rubin statistic allows a statement about the convergence of Monte Carlo simulations.
Monte Carlo simulations (chains) are started with different initial values. The samples from the respective burn-in phases are discarded. From the samples (of the j-th simulation), the variance between the chains and the variance in the chains is estimated:
An estimate of the Gelman-Rubin statistic then results as [1]
When L tends to infinity and B tends to zero, R tends to 1.
The Geweke Diagnostic compares whether the mean of the first x percent of a chain and the mean of the last y percent of a chain match.[ citation needed ]
In probability theory and statistics, variance is the expected value of the squared deviation from the mean of a random variable. The standard deviation (SD) is obtained as the square root of the variance. Variance is a measure of dispersion, meaning it is a measure of how far a set of numbers is spread out from their average value. It is the second central moment of a distribution, and the covariance of the random variable with itself, and it is often represented by , , , , or .
In probability and statistics, Student's t distribution is a continuous probability distribution that generalizes the standard normal distribution. Like the latter, it is symmetric around zero and bell-shaped.
In probability theory, the law of large numbers (LLN) is a mathematical theorem that states that the average of the results obtained from a large number of independent and identical random samples converges to the true value, if it exists. More formally, the LLN states that given a sample of independent and identically distributed values, the sample mean converges to the true mean.
In statistics, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a class of algorithms used to draw samples from a probability distribution. Given a probability distribution, one can construct a Markov chain whose elements' distribution approximates it – that is, the Markov chain's equilibrium distribution matches the target distribution. The more steps that are included, the more closely the distribution of the sample matches the actual desired distribution.
Importance sampling is a Monte Carlo method for evaluating properties of a particular distribution, while only having samples generated from a different distribution than the distribution of interest. Its introduction in statistics is generally attributed to a paper by Teun Kloek and Herman K. van Dijk in 1978, but its precursors can be found in statistical physics as early as 1949. Importance sampling is also related to umbrella sampling in computational physics. Depending on the application, the term may refer to the process of sampling from this alternative distribution, the process of inference, or both.
In mathematics, Monte Carlo integration is a technique for numerical integration using random numbers. It is a particular Monte Carlo method that numerically computes a definite integral. While other algorithms usually evaluate the integrand at a regular grid, Monte Carlo randomly chooses points at which the integrand is evaluated. This method is particularly useful for higher-dimensional integrals.
Particle filters, or sequential Monte Carlo methods, are a set of Monte Carlo algorithms used to find approximate solutions for filtering problems for nonlinear state-space systems, such as signal processing and Bayesian statistical inference. The filtering problem consists of estimating the internal states in dynamical systems when partial observations are made and random perturbations are present in the sensors as well as in the dynamical system. The objective is to compute the posterior distributions of the states of a Markov process, given the noisy and partial observations. The term "particle filters" was first coined in 1996 by Pierre Del Moral about mean-field interacting particle methods used in fluid mechanics since the beginning of the 1960s. The term "Sequential Monte Carlo" was coined by Jun S. Liu and Rong Chen in 1998.
Directional statistics is the subdiscipline of statistics that deals with directions, axes or rotations in Rn. More generally, directional statistics deals with observations on compact Riemannian manifolds including the Stiefel manifold.
In probability theory and directional statistics, the von Mises distribution is a continuous probability distribution on the circle. It is a close approximation to the wrapped normal distribution, which is the circular analogue of the normal distribution. A freely diffusing angle on a circle is a wrapped normally distributed random variable with an unwrapped variance that grows linearly in time. On the other hand, the von Mises distribution is the stationary distribution of a drift and diffusion process on the circle in a harmonic potential, i.e. with a preferred orientation. The von Mises distribution is the maximum entropy distribution for circular data when the real and imaginary parts of the first circular moment are specified. The von Mises distribution is a special case of the von Mises–Fisher distribution on the N-dimensional sphere.
In mathematics, more specifically in the theory of Monte Carlo methods, variance reduction is a procedure used to increase the precision of the estimates obtained for a given simulation or computational effort. Every output random variable from the simulation is associated with a variance which limits the precision of the simulation results. In order to make a simulation statistically efficient, i.e., to obtain a greater precision and smaller confidence intervals for the output random variable of interest, variance reduction techniques can be used. The main variance reduction methods are
In statistics, the bias of an estimator is the difference between this estimator's expected value and the true value of the parameter being estimated. An estimator or decision rule with zero bias is called unbiased. In statistics, "bias" is an objective property of an estimator. Bias is a distinct concept from consistency: consistent estimators converge in probability to the true value of the parameter, but may be biased or unbiased; see bias versus consistency for more.
In statistics, one-way analysis of variance is a technique to compare whether two or more samples' means are significantly different. This analysis of variance technique requires a numeric response variable "Y" and a single explanatory variable "X", hence "one-way".
In statistics, the reduced chi-square statistic is used extensively in goodness of fit testing. It is also known as mean squared weighted deviation (MSWD) in isotopic dating and variance of unit weight in the context of weighted least squares.
In statistics, a generalized p-value is an extended version of the classical p-value, which except in a limited number of applications, provides only approximate solutions.
In probability theory and directional statistics, a circular uniform distribution is a probability distribution on the unit circle whose density is uniform for all angles.
V-statistics are a class of statistics named for Richard von Mises who developed their asymptotic distribution theory in a fundamental paper in 1947. V-statistics are closely related to U-statistics introduced by Wassily Hoeffding in 1948. A V-statistic is a statistical function defined by a particular statistical functional of a probability distribution.
In statistics and physics, multicanonical ensemble is a Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling technique that uses the Metropolis–Hastings algorithm to compute integrals where the integrand has a rough landscape with multiple local minima. It samples states according to the inverse of the density of states, which has to be known a priori or be computed using other techniques like the Wang and Landau algorithm. Multicanonical sampling is an important technique for spin systems like the Ising model or spin glasses.
Mean-field particle methods are a broad class of interacting type Monte Carlo algorithms for simulating from a sequence of probability distributions satisfying a nonlinear evolution equation. These flows of probability measures can always be interpreted as the distributions of the random states of a Markov process whose transition probabilities depends on the distributions of the current random states. A natural way to simulate these sophisticated nonlinear Markov processes is to sample a large number of copies of the process, replacing in the evolution equation the unknown distributions of the random states by the sampled empirical measures. In contrast with traditional Monte Carlo and Markov chain Monte Carlo methods these mean-field particle techniques rely on sequential interacting samples. The terminology mean-field reflects the fact that each of the samples interacts with the empirical measures of the process. When the size of the system tends to infinity, these random empirical measures converge to the deterministic distribution of the random states of the nonlinear Markov chain, so that the statistical interaction between particles vanishes. In other words, starting with a chaotic configuration based on independent copies of initial state of the nonlinear Markov chain model, the chaos propagates at any time horizon as the size the system tends to infinity; that is, finite blocks of particles reduces to independent copies of the nonlinear Markov process. This result is called the propagation of chaos property. The terminology "propagation of chaos" originated with the work of Mark Kac in 1976 on a colliding mean-field kinetic gas model.
In statistics, jackknife variance estimates for random forest are a way to estimate the variance in random forest models, in order to eliminate the bootstrap effects.
In the mathematical theory of random processes, the Markov chain central limit theorem has a conclusion somewhat similar in form to that of the classic central limit theorem (CLT) of probability theory, but the quantity in the role taken by the variance in the classic CLT has a more complicated definition. See also the general form of Bienaymé's identity.
