QMC integration errors and quasi-asymptotics
AbstractA crude Monte Carlo (MC) method allows to calculate integrals over a d-dimensional cube. As the number N of integration nodes becomes large, the rate of probable error of the MC method decreases as {O(1/\sqrt{N})}. The use of quasi-random points instead of random points in the MC algorithm converts it to the quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) method. The asymptotic error estimate of QMC integration of d-dimensional functions contains a multiplier {1/N}. However, the multiplier {(\ln N)^{d}} is also a part of the error estimate, which makes it virtually useless. We have proved that, in the general case, the QMC error estimate is not limited to the factor {1/N}. However, our numerical experiments show that using quasi-random points of Sobol sequences with {N=2^{m}} with natural m makes the integration error approximately proportional to {1/N}. In our numerical experiments, {d\leq 15}, and we used {N\leq 2^{40}} points generated by the SOBOLSEQ16384 code published in 2011. In this code, {d\leq 2^{14}} and {N\leq 2^{63}}.