# Note 17 of Deep Learning: Monte Carlo Methods

Las Vegas algorithms and Monte Carlo algorithms are two rough categories of randomized algorithms. Las Vegas algorithms always return a precisely correct answer (or report fail), by consuming a random amount of resources; Monte Carlo algorithms return answers (by approximation) with a random amount of error, which may be reduced by expending more resources.

## Monte Carlo Sampling

When a sum or integral cannot be computed exactly (e.g. it has an exponential numbers of terms), we can approximate it using Monte Carlo sampling, which views the sum or integral as an expectation under some distribution, and approximate the expectation by a corresponding average.

Let

s can be approximated by drawing n samples $x^{(1)},…,x^{(n)}$ from p and computing the empirical average

We also have

which gives us a way of estimating $Var[\hat{s}_n]$.

When x cannot be sampled from p, an alternative is to use importance sampling, and more generally, to form a sequence of estimators that coverage towards the distribution of interest, which is the approach of Monte Carlo Markov chains (MCMC).

## Importance Sampling

It’s important to decide which part of the integrand should play the role of the probability $p(x)$ and which part should play the role of the quantity $f(x)$ whose expected value is to be estimated. But any decomposition can be rewritten as

where we now sample from $q$ and average $\frac{pf}{q}$.

In many cases, the problem to be solved will specify a given $p$ and $f$, which may not be the optimal choice in terms of the number of samples required to obtain a given level of accuracy. We can suppose $q^$ is the optimal choice which can be derived easily. The optimal $q^$* corresponds to optimal importance sampling.