Poor Man’s Monte Carlo

Abstract

Summary Monte Carlo methods often are and always should be part of the normal stock-in-trade of the ordinary practising statistician. This paper is an introduction to such methods, with an emphasis on those that require little or no calculating machinery. Three worked numerical examples, arranged in order of increasing difficulty, illustrate some of the more important general precepts. The last of these examples touches on some problems of self-avoiding walks, i.e., stochastic processes without multiple points.