| Summary: | This revised edition features a wealth of up-to-date information that facilitates a deeper understanding of problem solving across a wide array of subject areas, such as engineering, statistics, computer science, mathematics, and the physical and life sciences. The book begins with a modernized introduction that addresses the basic concepts of probability, Markov processes, and convex optimization. Subsequent chapters discuss the dramatic changes that have occurred in the field of the Monte Carlo method, with coverage of many modern topics including: Markov Chain Monte Carlo, variance reduction techniques such as importance (re-)sampling, and the transform likelihood ratio method, the score function method for sensitivity analysis, the stochastic approximation method and the stochastic counter-part method for Monte Carlo optimization, the cross-entropy method for rare events estimation and combinatorial optimization, and application of Monte Carlo techniques for counting problems. An extensive range of exercises is provided at the end of each chapter, as well as a generous sampling of applied examples. The Third Edition features a new chapter on the highly versatile splitting method, with applications to rare-event estimation, counting, sampling, and optimization. A second new chapter introduces the stochastic enumeration method, which is a new fast sequential Monte Carlo method for tree search.--Provided by publisher.
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