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Lecture

Correlated and Uncorrelated Sampling

In course

PHYS-403: Computer simulation of physical systems I

The two main topics covered by this course are classical molecular dynamics and the Monte Carlo method. ...

Description

This lecture covers the concepts of correlated and uncorrelated sampling in the context of generating random variables according to a given weight function. It explains the motivation behind these methods, the probability calculations for each, and introduces the concept of Markovian chains. The instructor also discusses the conditions of ergodicity and the notion of walkers in this context.

Instructor

Alfredo Pasquarello

Alfredo Pasquarello studied physics at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa and at the University of Pisa, obtaining their respective degrees in 1986. He obtained a doctoral degree at the EPFL in 1991 with a thesis on Multiphoton Transitions in Solids . Then, he moved to Bell Laboratories at Murray Hill (New Jersey), where he carried out postdoctoral research on the magnetic properties of carbon fullerenes. In 1993, he joined the Institute for Numerical Research in the Physics of Materials (IRRMA), where his activity involved first-principles simulation methods. In 1998, he was awarded the EPFL Latsis Prize for his research work on disordered silica materials. Succeeding in grant programs of the Swiss National Science Foundation, he then set up his own research group at IRRMA. In July 2003, he is appointed Professor in Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics at EPFL. Currently, he leads the Chair of Atomic Scale Simulation.

Official source

Related concepts (25)

Ergodicity

In mathematics, ergodicity expresses the idea that a point of a moving system, either a dynamical system or a stochastic process, will eventually visit all parts of the space that the system moves in, in a uniform and random sense. This implies that the average behavior of the system can be deduced from the trajectory of a "typical" point. Equivalently, a sufficiently large collection of random samples from a process can represent the average statistical properties of the entire process.

Ergodic theory

Ergodic theory is a branch of mathematics that studies statistical properties of deterministic dynamical systems; it is the study of ergodicity. In this context, "statistical properties" refers to properties which are expressed through the behavior of time averages of various functions along trajectories of dynamical systems. The notion of deterministic dynamical systems assumes that the equations determining the dynamics do not contain any random perturbations, noise, etc.

Sampling distribution

In statistics, a sampling distribution or finite-sample distribution is the probability distribution of a given random-sample-based statistic. If an arbitrarily large number of samples, each involving multiple observations (data points), were separately used in order to compute one value of a statistic (such as, for example, the sample mean or sample variance) for each sample, then the sampling distribution is the probability distribution of the values that the statistic takes on.

Ergodic hypothesis

In physics and thermodynamics, the ergodic hypothesis says that, over long periods of time, the time spent by a system in some region of the phase space of microstates with the same energy is proportional to the volume of this region, i.e., that all accessible microstates are equiprobable over a long period of time. Liouville's theorem states that, for a Hamiltonian system, the local density of microstates following a particle path through phase space is constant as viewed by an observer moving with the ensemble (i.

Variance

In probability theory and statistics, variance is the squared deviation from the mean of a random variable. The variance is also often defined as the square of the standard deviation. Variance is a measure of dispersion, meaning it is a measure of how far a set of numbers is spread out from their average value. It is the second central moment of a distribution, and the covariance of the random variable with itself, and it is often represented by , , , , or .

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