• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.49 no.6
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• pp.1172-1180
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• 2017

The application of Monte Carlo (MC) to large-scale fixed-source problems has recently become possible with new hybrid methods that automate generation of parameters for variance reduction techniques. Two common variance reduction techniques, weight windows and source biasing, have been automated and popularized by the consistent adjoint-driven importance sampling (CADIS) method. This method uses the adjoint solution from an inexpensive deterministic calculation to define a consistent set of weight windows and source particles for a subsequent MC calculation. One of the motivations for source consistency is to avoid the splitting or rouletting of particles at birth, which requires computational resources. However, it is not always possible or desirable to implement such consistency, which results in inconsistent source biasing. This paper develops an original framework that mathematically expresses the coupling of the weight window and source biasing techniques, allowing the authors to explore the impact of inconsistent source sampling on the variance of MC results. A numerical experiment supports this new framework and suggests that certain classes of problems may be relatively insensitive to inconsistent source sampling schemes with moderate levels of splitting and rouletting.

• Journal of the Korea Society for Simulation
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.91-106
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• 1996

Control Variate (CV) is very useful technique for variance reduction in a wide class of queueing network simulations. However, the loss in variance reduction caused by the estimation of the optimum control coefficients is an increasing function of the number of control variables. Therefore, in some situations, it is required to select an optimal set of control variables to maximize the variance reduction . In this paper, we develop the Adaptive Control Variates (ACV) method which selects an optimal set of control variates during the simulation adatively. ACV is useful to maximize the simulation efficiency when we need iterated simulations to find an optimal solution. One such an example is the Simulated Annealing (SA) because, in SA algorithm, we have to repeat in calculating the objective function values at each temperature, The ACV can also be applied to the queueing network optimization problems to find an optimal input parameters (such as service rates) to maximize the throughput rate with a certain cost constraint.

• Journal of the Korea Society for Simulation
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.129-136
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• 2005

We develop a variance reduction technique applicable in one simulation experiment whose purpose is to estimate the parameters of a first order linear model. This method utilizes the control variates obtained during the course of simulation run under Schruben and Margolin's method (S-M method). The performance of this method is shown to be similar in estimating the main effects, and to be superior to S-M method in estimating the overall mean response in a given model. We consider that a proposed method may yield a better result than S-M method if selected control variates are highly correlated with the response at each design point.

• Bulletin of the Korean Mathematical Society
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• v.55 no.4
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• pp.1303-1315
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• 2018

For principal component analysis (PCA) to efficiently analyze large scale matrices, it is crucial to find a few singular vectors in cheaper computational cost and under lower memory requirement. To compute those in a fast and robust way, we propose a new stochastic method. Especially, we adopt the stochastic variance reduced gradient (SVRG) method [11] to avoid asymptotically slow convergence in stochastic gradient descent methods. For that purpose, we reformulate the PCA problem as a unconstrained optimization problem using a quadratic penalty. In general, increasing the penalty parameter to infinity is needed for the equivalence of the two problems. However, in this case, exact penalization is guaranteed by applying the analysis in [24]. We establish the convergence rate of the proposed method to a stationary point and numerical experiments illustrate the validity and efficiency of the proposed method.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.45 no.1
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• pp.131-137
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• 2023

The phase reconstruction process in digital holographic microscopy involves a trade-off between the phase error and the high-spatial-frequency components. In this reconstruction process, if the narrow region of the sideband is windowed in the Fourier domain, the phase error from the DC component will be reduced, but the high-spatial-frequency components will be lost. However, if the wide region is windowed, the 3D profile will include the high-spatial-frequency components, but the phase error will increase. To solve this trade-off, we propose the high-variance pixel averaging method, which uses the variance map of the reconstructed depth profiles of the windowed sidebands of different sizes in the Fourier domain to classify the phase error and the high-spatial-frequency components. Our proposed method calculates the average of the high-variance pixels because they include the noise from the DC component. In addition, for the nonaveraged pixels, the reconstructed phase data created by the spatial frequency components of the widest window are used to include the high-spatialfrequency components. We explain the mathematical algorithm of our proposed method and compare it with conventional methods to verify its advantages.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.54 no.10
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• pp.3803-3810
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• 2022

OpenMC is a community-driven open-source Monte Carlo neutron and photon transport simulation code. The Weight Window Mesh (WWM) function and an automatic Global Variance Reduction (GVR) method was recently developed and implemented in a developmental branch of OpenMC. This WWM function and GVR method broaden OpenMC's usage in general purposes deep penetration shielding calculations. However, the Local Variance Reduction (LVR) method, which suits the source-detector problem, is still missing in OpenMC. In this work, the Weight Window Generator (WWG) function has been developed and benchmarked for the same branch. This WWG function allows OpenMC to generate the WWM for the source-detector problem on its own. Single-material cases with varying shielding and sources were used to benchmark the WWG function and investigate how to set up the particle histories utilized in WWG-run and WWM-run. Results show that there is a maximum improvement of WWM generated by WWG. Based on the above results, instructions on determining the particle histories utilized in WWG-run and WWM-run for optimal computation efficiency are given and tested with a few multi-material cases. These benchmarks demonstrate the ability of the OpenMC WWG function and the above instructions for the source-detector problem. This developmental branch will be released and merged into the main distribution in the future.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 1996.07b
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• pp.887-889
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• 1996

This paper presents Variance Reduction Techniques of the Monte Carlo Simulation considering Non-Exponential Distribution for Power System Reliability Evaluation. Generally, the components consisting of power system are assumed to be exponentially distributed in their state residence time. Sometimes, however, this assumption may cause a lot of errors in the reliability index evaluation. Non-exponential distribution can be approximated by a sum of several Erlangian distributions, whose inverse transform is easily calculated by using composition method. This paper proposes a new approach to deal with the non-exponential distribution and to reduce the simulation time by virtue of Variance Reduction Techniques such as Control Variate and Antithetic Variate.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.55 no.11
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• pp.4228-4237
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• 2023

The Improved Deterministic Truncation of Monte Carlo (iDTMC) is a powerful acceleration and variance reduction scheme in the Monte Carlo analysis. The concept of the iDTMC method and correlated sampling-based real variance estimation are briefly introduced. Moreover, the application of the iterative scheme to the correlated sampling is discussed. The iDTMC method is utilized in a 3-dimensional small modular reactor (SMR) model problem. The real variances of burnup-dependent criticality and power distribution are evaluated and compared with the ones obtained from 30 independent iDTMC calculations. The impact of the inactive cycles on the correlated sampling is also evaluated to investigate the consistency of the correlated sample scheme. In addition, numerical performances and sensitivity analysis on the real variance estimation are performed in view of the figure of merit of the iDTMC method. The numerical results show that the correlated sampling accurately estimates the real variances with high computational efficiencies.

• Journal of the Korea Society for Simulation
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.25-36
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• 1995

We develop a variance reduction technique in one simulation experiment whose purpose is to estimate the parameters of a first-order linear model. This method utilizes the control variates obtained during the course of simulation run under Schruben and Margolin's method (S-M method). The performance of this method is shown to be similar in estimating the main effects, and to be superior to S-M method in estimating the overall mean response in the hospital simulation experiment. For the general case, we consider that a proposed method may yield a better result than S-M method if selected control variates are highly correlated with the response at each design point.

• The Journal of the Korea institute of electronic communication sciences
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• v.8 no.9
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• pp.1299-1305
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• 2013

In this paper, we investigate a method of reducing the computational cost in speech recognition by dimensionality reduction of MFCC feature vectors. Eigendecomposition of the feature vectors renders linear transformation of the vectors in such a way that puts the vector components in order of variances. The first component has the largest variance and hence serves as the most important one in relevant pattern classification. Therefore, we might consider a method of reducing the computational cost and achieving no degradation of the recognition performance at the same time by dimensionality reduction through exclusion of the least-variance components. Experimental results show that the MFCC components might be reduced by about half without significant adverse effect on the recognition error rate.