Strategies for combining antithetic variates and control variates in designed simulation experiments

Strategies for combining antithetic variates and control variates in designed simulation experiments

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Article ID: iaor19951134
Country: United States
Volume: 40
Issue: 8
Start Page Number: 1021
End Page Number: 1034
Publication Date: Aug 1994
Journal: Management Science
Authors: ,
Keywords: statistics: experiment
Abstract:

In this paper the authors examine three methods for combining the variance reduction techniques of antithetic variates and control variates to estimate the mean response in a designed simulation experiment. In Combined Method I, the authors perform h independent pairs of simulation runs as follows-on the second run of each such pair, the authors use random number streams that are antithetic (complementary) to the streams used on the first run of the pair to drive the non-control-variate components of the simulation model; and they use independent random number streams to drive the control-variate components of the simulation model. In Combined Method II, the authors also perform h independent pairs of runs; but on each pair of runs they use independent random number streams to drive the non-control-variate model components, and the authors use antithetic random number streams to drive the control-variate components. In Combined Method III, all of the random number streams driving the second run of each pair of runs are antithetic to the streams driving the first run of the pair. For each of these three methods the authors derive the variance of the resulting estimator of the mean response to make a theoretical comparison of the efficiency of each method. They implemented these three methods, along with the classical method of control variates, in a simultion model of a resource-constrained activity network to show how each combined method is implemented in practice and to evaluate the performance of each combined method experimentally. The results indicate that: (a) Combined Method III outperformed all other methods, and (b) the effectiveness of Combined Method III as well as the choice of whether to use Combined Method I or Combined Method II depends on the degree of correlation between the control variates and the response.

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