On the effective dimension and multilevel Monte Carlo

Abstract

I consider the problem of integrating a function $f$ over the $d$-dimensional unit cube. I describe a multilevel Monte Carlo method that estimates the integral with variance at most $ε^{2}$ in $O(d+\ln(d)d_{t}ε^{-2})$ time, for $ε>0$, where $d_{t}$ is the truncation dimension of $f$. In contrast, the standard Monte Carlo method typically achieves such variance in $O(dε^{-2})$ time. A lower bound of order $d+d_{t}ε^{-2}$ is described for a class of multilevel Monte Carlo methods.