# Scaling and Monte Carlo integration methods

Here’s an apparent paradox. You’ll hear that Monte Carlo methods are independent of dimension, and that they scale poorly with dimension. How can both statements be true?

The most obvious way to compute multiple integrals is to use product methods, analogous to the way you learn to compute multiple integrals by hand. Unfortunately the amount of work necessary with this approach grows exponentially with the number of variables, and so the approach is impractical beyond modest dimensions.

The idea behind Monte Carlo integration, or integration by darts, is to estimate the area under a (high dimensional) surface by taking random points and counting how many fall below the surface. More details here. The error goes down like the reciprocal of the square root of the number of points. The error estimate has nothing to do with the dimension per se. In that sense Monte Carlo integration is indeed independent of dimension, and for that reason is often used for numerical integration in dimensions too high to use product methods.

Suppose you’re trying to estimate what portion of a (high dimensional) box some region takes up, and you know a priori that the proportion is in the ballpark of 1/2. You could refine this to a more accurate estimate with Monte Carlo, throwing darts at the box and seeing how many land in the region of interest.

But in practice, the regions we want to estimate are small relative to any box we’d put around them. For example, suppose you want to estimate the volume of a unit ball in n dimensions by throwing darts at the unit cube in n dimensions. When n = 10, only about 1 dart in 400 will land in the ball. When n = 100, only one dart out of 1070 will land inside the ball. (See more here.) It’s very likely you’d never have a dart land inside the ball, no matter how much computing power you used.

If no darts land inside the region of interest, then you would estimate the volume of the region of interest to be zero. Is this a problem? Yes and no. The volume is very small, and the absolute error in estimating a small number to be zero is small. But the relative is 100%.

(For an analogous problem, see this discussion about the approximation sin(θ) = θ for small angles. It’s not just saying that one small number is approximately equal to another small number: all small numbers are approximately equal in absolute error! The small angle approximation has small relative error.)

If you want a small relative error in Monte Carlo integration, and you usually do, then you need to come up with a procedure that puts a larger proportion of integration points in the region of interest. One such technique is importance sampling, so called because it puts more samples in the important region. The closer the importance sampler fits the region of interest, the better the results will be. But you may not know enough a priori to create an efficient importance sampler.

So while the absolute accuracy of Monte Carlo integration does not depend on dimension, the problems you want to solve with Monte Carlo methods typically get harder with dimension.

# Integrating polynomials over a sphere or ball

Spheres and balls are examples of common words that take on a technical meaning in math, as I wrote about here. Recall the unit sphere in n dimensions is the set of points with distance 1 from the origin. The unit ball is the set of points of distance less than or equal to 1 from the origin. The sphere is the surface of the ball.

Integrating a polynomial in several variables over a ball or sphere is easy. For example, take the polynomial xy² + 5x²z² in three variables. The integral of the first term, xy², is zero. If any variable in a term has an odd exponent, then the integral of that term is zero by symmetry. The integral over half of the sphere (ball) will cancel out the integral over the opposite half of the sphere (ball). So we only need to be concerned with terms like 5x²z².

Now in n dimensions, suppose the exponents of x1, x2, …, xn are a1, a2, …, an respectively. If any of the a‘s are odd, the integral over the sphere or ball will be zero, so we assume all the a‘s are even. In that case the integral over the unit sphere is simply

where

is the multivariate beta function and for each i we define bi = (ai + 1)/2. When n = 2 then B is the (ordinary) beta function.

Note that the integral over the unit sphere doesn’t depend on the dimension of the sphere.

The integral over the unit ball is

which is proportional to the integral over the sphere, where the proportionality constant depends on the sum of the exponents (the original exponents, the a‘s, not the b‘s) and the dimension n.

Note that if we integrate the constant polynomial 1 over the unit sphere, we get the surface area of the unit sphere, and if we integrate it over the unit ball, we get the volume of the unit ball.

You can find a derivation for the integral results above in [1]. The proof is basically Liouville’s trick for integrating the normal distribution density, but backward. Instead of going from rectangular to polar coordinates, you introduce a normal density and go from polar to rectangular coordinates.

[1] Gerald B. Folland, How to Integrate a Polynomial over a Sphere. The American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 108, No. 5 (May, 2001), pp. 446-448.

# Hermite polynomials, expected values, and integration

In a previous post, I alluded to using Hermite polynomials in conjunction with higher-order Laplace approximation. In this post I’ll expand on what that means.

Hermite polynomials are orthogonal polynomials over the real line with respect to the weight given by the standard normal distribution. (There are two conventions for defining Hermite polynomials, what Wikipedia calls the physicist convention and the probabilist convention. We’re using the latter here.)

The first few Hermite polynomials are 1, x, x2 – 1, x3 – 3x, … . You can find the rest of the Hermite polynomials via the recurrence relation

Hn+1(x) = x Hnn Hn-1(x).

You could think of the Hermite polynomials as the right basis to use when working with normal probability distributions. Writing a polynomial as a linear combination of Hermite polyn0mials is a change of basis that makes integration easy:

Here [k even] is the function that returns 1 if k is even and 0 otherwise. This notation was introduced by Kenneth Iverson in the APL programming language and has become moderately common in mathematics.

# Laplace approximation of an integral from Bayesian logistic regression

Define

and

This integral comes up in Bayesian logistic regression with a uniform (improper) prior. We will use this integral to illustrate a simple case of Laplace approximation.

The idea of Laplace approximation is to approximate the integral of a Gaussian-like function by the integral of a (scaled) Gaussian with the same mode and same curvature at the mode. That’s the most common, second order Laplace approximation. More generally, Laplace’s approximation depends on truncating a Taylor series, and truncating after the 2nd order term gives the approximation described above.

Let x0 be the place where f takes on its maximum and let g = log f. Note that g also takes on its maximum at x0 and so its first derivative is zero there. Then the (second order) Laplace approximation has the following derivation.

We can show that

and

It follows that x0 = log (m/n) and the Laplace approximation for I(m, n) reduces to

.

Now let’s compare the Laplace approximation to the exact value of the integral for a few values of m and n. We would expect the Laplace approximation to be more accurate when the integrand is shaped more like the Gaussian density. This happens when m and n are large and when they are more nearly equal. (The function f is a likelihood, and m+n is the number of data points in the likelihood. More data means the likelihood is more nearly normal. Also, m = n means f is symmetric, which improves the normal approximation.)

We’ll look at (m, n) = (2, 1), (20, 10), (200, 100), and (15, 15). Here’s the plot of f(x, 2, 1) with its normal approximation, scaled vertically so that the heights match.

Even for small arguments, the Gaussian approximation fits well on the left side, but not so much on the right. For large arguments it would be hard to see the difference between the two curves.

Here are the results of the Laplace approximation and exact integration.

|-----+-----+---------------+---------------+--------------|
|   m |   n |        approx |         exact |    rel error |
|-----+-----+---------------+---------------+--------------|
|   2 |   1 |    0.45481187 |           0.5 | -0.090376260 |
|  20 |  10 |  4.9442206e-9 | 4.99250870e-9 | -0.009672111 |
|  15 |  15 | 8.5243139e-10 | 8.5956334e-10 | -0.008297178 |
| 200 | 100 | 3.6037801e-84 | 3.6072854e-84 | -0.000971728 |
|-----+-----+---------------+---------------+--------------|


The integrals were computed exactly using Mathematica; the results are rational numbers. [1]

Note that when m and n increase by a factor of 10, the relative error goes down by about a factor of 10. This is in keeping with theory that say the error should be O(1/(m+n)). Also, note that the error for (15, 15) is a little lower than that for (20, 10). The errors are qualitatively just what we expected.

***

[1] I initially used Mathematica to compute the integrals, but then realized that’s not necessary. The change of variables u = exp(x) / (1 + exp(x)) shows that

I(ab) = B(ab+1) + B(a+1, b)

where B is the beta function. Incidentally, this shows that if a and b are integers then  I(ab) is rational.

# Making a problem easier by making it harder

In the oral exam for my PhD, my advisor asked me a question about a differential equation. I don’t recall the question, but I remember the interaction that followed.

I was stuck, and my advisor countered by saying “Let me ask you a harder question.” I was still stuck, and so he said “Let me ask you an even harder question.” Then I got it.

By “harder” he meant “more general.” He started with a concrete problem, then made it progressively more abstract until I recognized it. His follow-up questions were logically harder but psychologically easier.

This incident came to mind when I ran across an example in Lawrence Evans’ control theory course notes. He uses the example to illustrate what he calls an example of mathematical wisdom:

It is sometimes easier to solve a problem by embedding it within a larger class of problems and then solving the larger class all at once.

The problem is to evaluate the integral of the sinc function:

He does so by introducing the more general problem of evaluating the function

which reduces to the sinc integral when α = 0.

We can find the derivative of I(α) by differentiating under the integral sign and integrating by parts twice.

Therefore

As α goes to infinity, I(α) goes to zero, and so C = π/2 and I(0) = π/2.

Incidentally, note that instead of computing an integral in order to solve a differential equation as one often does, we introduced a differential equation in order to compute an integral.

# Irrational rotations are ergodic

In a blog post yesterday, I mentioned that the golden angle is an irrational portion of a circle, and so a sequence of rotations by the golden angle will not repeat itself. We can say more: rotations by an irrational portion of a circle are ergodic. Roughly speaking, this means that not only does the sequence not repeat itself, the sequence “mixes well” in a technical sense.

Ergodic functions have the property that “the time average equals the space average.” We’ll unpack what that means and illustrate it by simulation.

Suppose we pick a starting point x on the circle then repeatedly rotate it by a golden angle. Take an integrable function f on the circle and form the average of its values at the sequence of rotations. This is the time average. The space average is the integral of f over the circle, divided by the circumference of the circle. The ergodic theorem says that the time average equals the space average, except possibly for a setting of starting values of measure zero.

More generally, let X be a measure space (like the unit circle) with measure μ let T be an ergodic transformation (like rotating by a golden angle), Then for almost all starting values x we have the following:

Let’s do a simulation to see this in practice by running the following Python script.

        from scipy import pi, cos
from scipy.constants import golden

golden_angle = 2*pi*golden**-2

def T(x):
return (x + golden_angle) % (2*pi)

def time_average(x, f, T, n):
s = 0
for k in range(n):
s += f(x)
x = T(x)
return s/n

def space_average(f):
return integral / (2*pi)

f = lambda x: cos(x)**2
N = 1000000

print( time_average(0, f, T, N) )
print( space_average(f) )


In this case we get 0.49999996 for the time average, and 0.5 for the space average. They’re not the same, but we only used a finite value of n; we didn’t take a limit. We should expect the two values to be close because n is large, but we shouldn’t expect them to be equal.

Update: The code and results were updated to fix a bug pointed out in the comments below.  I had written ... % 2*pi when I should have written ... % (2*pi). I assumed the modulo operator was lower precedence than multiplication, but it’s not. It was a coincidence that the buggy code was fairly accurate.

A friend of mine, a programmer with decades of experience, recently made a similar error. He’s a Clojure fan but was writing in C or some similar language. He rightfully pointed out that this kind of error simply cannot happen in Clojure. Lisps, including Clojure, don’t have operator precedence because they don’t have operators. They only have functions, and the order in which functions are called is made explicit with parentheses. The Python code x % 2*pi corresponds to (* (mod x 2) pi) in Clojure, and the Python code x % (2*pi) corresponds to (mod x (* 2 pi)).

Related: Origin of the word “ergodic”

# Numerically integrating periodic functions

The trapezoid rule is the most obvious numerical integration technique. It comes directly from the definition of a definite integral, just a Riemann sum.

It’s a very crude technique in general; you can get much more accuracy with the same number of function evaluations by using a more sophisticated method. But for smooth periodic functions, the trapezoid rule works astonishingly well.

This post will look at two similar functions. The trapezoid rule will be very accurate for one but not for the other. The first function is

g(x) = exp( cos(x) ).

The second function, h(x) replaces the cosine with its Taylor approximation 1 – x2/2. That is,

h(x) = exp(1 – x2/2 ).

The graph below shows both functions.

Both functions are perfectly smooth. The function g is naturally periodic with period 2π. The function h could be modified to be a periodic function with the same period since h(-π) = h(π).

But the periodic extension of h is not smooth. It’s continuous, but it has a kink at odd multiples of π. The derivative is not continuous at these points. Here’s a close-up to show the kink.

Now suppose we want to integrate both functions from -π to π. Over that range both functions are smooth. But the behavior of h “off stage” effects the efficiency of the trapezoid rule. Making h periodic by pasting copies together that don’t match up smoothly does not make it act like a smooth periodic function as far as integration is concerned.

Here’s the error in the numerical integration using 2, 3, 4, …, 10 integration points.

The integration error for both functions decreases rapidly as we go from 2 to 5 integration points. And in fact the integration error for h is slightly less than that for g with 5 integration points. But the convergence for h practically stops at that point compared to g where the integration error decreases exponentially. Using only 10 integration points, the error has dropped to approximately 7×10-8 while the error for h is five orders of magnitude larger.

To read more along these lines, see J. A. C. Weideman’s article Numerical Integration of Periodic Functions: A Few Examples, The American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 109, No. 1, pp. 21–36.

# Simplify integration with complex variables

Last night I was helping my daughter with her calculus homework. One of the problems was the following integral:

This is an interesting problem for two reasons. First, it illustrates a clever variation on integration by parts; that’s why it was assigned. But it can also be computed using complex variables. As is often the case, the “complex” approach is simpler. Below I’ll show the solution the students were expected to find, then one that they wouldn’t not be expected to find.

## Integration by parts

The traditional approach to this integral is to integrate by parts. Letting u = sin(4x), the integral becomes

Next we integrate by parts one more time, this time letting u = cos(4x). This gives us

At this point it looks like we’re getting nowhere. We could keep on integrating by parts forever. Not only that, we’re going in circles: we have an integral that’s just like the one we started with. But then the clever step is to realize that this is a good thing. Let I be our original integral. Then

Now we can solve for I:

## Complex variables

Here’s another approach. Recognize that sin(4x) is the imaginary part of exp(4ix) and so our integral is the imaginary part of

which we can integrate immediately:

There’s still algebra to do, but the calculus is over. And while the algebra will take a few steps, it’s routine.

First, let’s take care of the fraction.

Next,

and so our integral is the complex part of

which gives us the same result as before.

The complex variable requires one insight: recognizing a sine as the real part of an exponential. The traditional approach requires several insights: two integrations by parts and solving for the original integral.

Related:

# An integral with a couple lessons

If you present calculus students with a definite integral, their Pavlovian response is “Take the anti-derivative, evaluate it at the limits, and subtract.” They think that’s what it means. But it’s not what a definite integral means. It’s how you (usually) calculate its value. This is not a pedantic fine point but a practically important distinction. It pays to distinguish what something means from how you usually calculate it. Without this distinction, things that are possible may seem impossible. [1]

For example, suppose you want to compute the following integral that comes up frequently in probability.

There is no (elementary) function whose derivative is exp(-x2). It’s not just hard to find or ugly. It simply doesn’t exist, not within the universe of elementary functions. There are functions whose derivative is exp(-x2), but these functions are not finite algebraic combinations of the kinds of functions you’d see in high school.

If you think of the definite integral above as meaning “the result you get when you find an antiderivative, let its arguments go off to ∞ and -∞, and subtract the two limits” then you’ll never calculate it. And when you hear that the antiderivative doesn’t exist (in the world of functions you’re familiar with) then you might think that not only can you not calculate the integral, no one can.

In fact the integral is easy to calculate. It requires an ingenious trick [2], but once you see that trick it’s not hard.

Let I be the value of the integral. Changing the integration variable makes no difference, i.e.

and so

This integral can be converted to polar coordinates. Instead of describing the plane as an infinite square with x and y each going off to infinity in both directions, we can think of it as an infinite disk, with radius going off to infinity. The advantage of this approach is that the Jacobian of the change of variables gives us an extra factor of r that makes the exponential integral tractable.

From this we get I2 = π and so I = √π.

This specific trick comes up occasionally. But more generally, it is often the case that definite integrals are easier to compute than indefinite integrals. One of the most common applications of complex analysis is computing such integrals through the magic of contour integration. This leads to a lesson closely related to the one above, namely that you may not have to do what it looks like you need to do. In this case, you don’t always need to compute indefinite integrals (anti-derivatives) as an intermediate step to compute definite integrals. [3]

Mathematics is filled with theorems that effectively say that you don’t actually have to compute what you conceptually need to compute. Sometimes you can get by with calculating much less.

* * *

[1] One frustration I’ve had working with statisticians is that many have forgotten the distinction between what they want to calculate and how they calculate it. This makes it difficult to suggest better ways of computing things.

[2] Lord Kelvin said of this trick “A mathematician is one to whom that is as obvious as that twice two makes four is to you. Liouville was a mathematician.”

[3] If you look back carefully, we had to compute the integral of exp(-r2) r, which you would do by first computing its anti-derivative. But we didn’t have to compute the anti-derivative of the original integrand. We traded a hard (in some sense impossible) anti-derivative problem for an easy one.

# Yet another way to define fractional derivatives

Fractional integrals are easier to define than fractional derivatives. And for sufficiently smooth functions, you can use the former to define the latter.

The Riemann-Liouville fractional integral starts from the observation that for positive integer n,

This motivates a definition of fractional integrals

which is valid for any complex α with positive real part. Derivatives and integrals are inverses for integer degree, and we use this to define fractional derivatives: the derivative of degree n is the integral of degree –n. So if we could define fractional integrals for any degree, we could define a derivative of degree α to be an integral of degree -α.

Unfortunately we can’t do this directly since our definition only converges in the right half-plane. But for (ordinary) differentiable f, we can integrate the Riemann-Liouville definition of fractional integral by parts:

We can use the right side of this equation to define the left side when the real part of α is bigger than -1. And if f has two ordinary derivatives, we can repeat this process to define fractional integrals for α with real part bigger than -2. We can repeat this process to define the fractional integrals (and hence fractional derivatives) for any degree we like, provided the function has enough ordinary derivatives.

See previous posts for two other ways of defining fractional derivatives, via Fourier transforms and via the binomial theorem.