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inria-00636924, version 3

Finite-Time Analysis of Stratified Sampling for Monte Carlo

Alexandra Carpentier () 1, Rémi Munos () 1

NIPS - Twenty-Fifth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (2011)

Résumé : We consider the problem of stratified sampling for Monte-Carlo integration. We model this problem in a multi-armed bandit setting, where the arms represent the strata, and the goal is to estimate a weighted average of the mean values of the arms. We propose a strategy that samples the arms according to an upper bound on their standard deviations and compare its estimation quality to an ideal allocation that would know the standard deviations of the strata. We provide two regret analyses: a distribution-dependent bound $\widetilde O(n^{-3/2})$ that depends on a measure of the disparity of the strata, and a distribution-free bound $\widetilde O(n^{-4/3})$ that does not.

  • 1 :  SEQUEL (INRIA Lille - Nord Europe)
  • INRIA – CNRS : UMR8146 – Université Lille I - Sciences et technologies – Université Lille III - Sciences humaines et sociales – Ecole Centrale de Lille
 
  • inria-00636924, version 3
  • oai:hal.inria.fr:inria-00636924
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  • Soumis le : Lundi 27 Février 2012, 17:46:09
  • Dernière modification le : Mercredi 16 Mai 2012, 17:11:41