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Toeplitz Monte Carlo

Motivated mainly by applications to partial differential equations with random coefficients, we introduce a new class of Monte Carlo estimators, called Toeplitz Monte Carlo (TMC) estimator for approximating the integral of a multivariate function with respect to the direct product of an identical univariate probability measure. The TMC estimator generates a sequence $x_1,x_2,\ldots$ of i.i.d. samples for one random variable, and then uses $(x_{n+s-1},x_{n+s-2}\ldots,x_n)$ with $n=1,2,\ldots$ as quadrature points, where $s$ denotes the dimension. Although consecutive points have some dependency, the concatenation of all quadrature nodes is represented by a Toeplitz matrix, which allows for a fast matrix-vector multiplication. In this paper we study the variance of the TMC estimator and its dependence on the dimension $s$. Numerical experiments confirm the considerable efficiency improvement over the standard Monte Carlo estimator for applications to partial differential equations with random coefficients, particularly when the dimension $s$ is large.