Dipartimento di InformaticaUniversità degli Studi di Milano

Simulation2007/08

MSc in Computer science · University of Milan · Lectures are in Italian · 3 credits · 24 hours

Archived edition: this page is kept for reference, and some materials or links may no longer be available.

This course introduces to the theory and to some applications of stochastic simulation. The course is divided into two modules: this page refers to the first one (Theory and techniques). The second module (Queue theory and software tools) is held by Prof. Trubian and will start on mid-November.

News

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Course schedule

Lectures will take place at the Computer science department, according to the following schedule:

Day Hour Place
Monday 10:30 - 12:30 aula 6
Thursday 10:30 - 12:30 aula 6

Any change to the schedule will be announced in class and published in paragraph News of this page.

Office hours

By appointment, room 5015 of the Computer Science Department. It is possible contact the teacher by e-mail, taking care to read in advance the guide prepared by Prof. Sebastiano Vigna and clearly specifying in the message the course name and the academic year. In particular, students are encouraged to always use their academic address (i.e. based on the domain studenti.unimi.it) signing with name and student ID number and recalling that the response time may vary depending on the teacher commitments.

Course material

The course is based on the following textbook: Sheldon M. Ross, Simulation, fourth edition, Elsevier/Academic Press, Amsterdam, 2006 (ISBN 978-0125980630).

Syllabus

The course explains the topics listed in the lecture calendar, covering the textbook contents in chapters 1 to 9.

Lectures calendar

The links allow to download Wolfram Mathematica notebooks containing some of the simulations shown in class. These documents are provided as an example: the course is not about learning this software tool and the examination will not address his knowledge. However, students are encouraged to independently implement the techniques explained in class, possibly in different languages.

Lecture Date Topic Material
L01 01/10/2007 Examples of complex system simulation
L02 03/10/2007 Pseudorandom number simulation
L03 08/10/2007 Simulation of discrete random variables: the inverse transform method
    L04 10/10/2007 Simulation of continuous random variables: inverse transform method and methods for the normal distribution
    L05 15/10/2007 Simulation through plugin and acceptance-rejection techniques
    L06 17/10/2007 Simulation of discrete event systems
    L07 22/10/2007 Statistical analysis of simulated data: point estimation
    L08 24/10/2007 Statistical analysis of simulated data: interval estimation and bootstrap techniques
    L09 29/10/2007 Variance reduction techniques: use antithetic variables and control variates
    L10 31/10/2007 Variance reduction techniques: use of control variates and reduction by conditioning
    L11 05/11/2007 Variance reduction techniques: reduction by conditioning and stratified sampling
    L12 07/11/2007 Statistical validation techniques

    Exam modalities

    The exam consists in an oral test about the program of one module and in a project about the remaining course module, by appointment.