We consider estimating an expected infinite-horizon cumulative cost/reward contingent on an underlying stochastic process by Monte Carlo simulation. An unbiased estimator based on truncating the cumulative cost at a random horizon is proposed. Explicit forms for the optimal distributions of the...

In recent literature, a new class of unbiased Monte Carlo estimators have been proposed, which is based on truncating a telescopic representation of the expectation of a functional of the stochastic process at an independent random level. The generality of the method lies in that it can...

We develop approximate estimation methods for exponential random graph models (ERGMs), whose likelihood is proportional to an intractable normalizing constant. The usual approach approximates this constant with Monte Carlo simulations, however convergence may be exponentially slow. We propose a...