Variance Reduction Techniques for Monte Carlo Simulation

Variance reduction techniques are a family of methods that improve the efficiency of Monte Carlo simulation by achieving the same estimation accuracy with fewer random draws. Developed incrementally from the 1950s onward — with antithetic variates attributed to Hammersley and Morton, control variates formalised by Lavenberg and Welch, and importance sampling rooted in Kahn and Marshall — the family includes antithetic variates (AV), control variates (CV), importance sampling (IS), and stratification, each exploiting a different structural property of the target quantity to lower estimator variance without introducing bias.