Monte Carlo integration

An illustration of Monte Carlo integration. In this example, the domain D is the inner circle and the domain E is the square. Because the square's area (4) can be easily calculated, the area of the circle (π*1.02) can be estimated by the ratio (0.8) of the points inside the circle (40) to the total number of points (50), yielding an approximation for the circle's area of 4*0.8 = 3.2 ≈ π.

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,[1] Monte Carlo randomly chooses points at which the integrand is evaluated.[2] This method is particularly useful for higher-dimensional integrals.[3]

There are different methods to perform a Monte Carlo integration, such as uniform sampling, stratified sampling, importance sampling, sequential Monte Carlo (also known as a particle filter), and mean-field particle methods.

  1. ^ Press et al. 2007, Chap. 4
  2. ^ Press et al. 2007, Chap. 7
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference newman1999ch2 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).