TPA: A New Method for Approximate Counting

<p>Many high dimensional integrals can be reduced to the problem of finding the relative measure of two sets. Often one set will be exponentially larger than the other. A standard method of dealing with this problem is to interpolate between the sets with a series of nested sets where neighb...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Schott, Sarah
Other Authors: Huber, Mark
Published: 2012
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/10161/5429
Description
Summary:<p>Many high dimensional integrals can be reduced to the problem of finding the relative measure of two sets. Often one set will be exponentially larger than the other. A standard method of dealing with this problem is to interpolate between the sets with a series of nested sets where neighboring nested sets have relative measures bounded above by a constant. Choosing these sets can be very difficult in practice. Here a new approach that creates a randomly drawn sequence of such sets is presented. This procedure gives faster approximation algorithms and a well-balanced set of nested sets that are essential to building effective tempering and annealing algorithms.</p> === Dissertation