an email exchange about integral representations

I had an interesting email exchange [or rather exchange of emails] with a (German) reader of Introducing Monte Carlo Methods with R in the past days, as he had difficulties with the validation of the accept-reject algorithm via the integral

$\mathbb{P}(Y\in \mathcal{A},U\le f(Y)/Mg(Y)) = \int_\mathcal{A} \int_0^{f(y)/Mg(y)}\,\text{d}u\,g(y)\,\text{d}y\,,$

in that it took me several iterations [as shown in the above] to realise the issue was with the notation

$\int_0^a \,\text{d}u\,,$

which seemed to be missing a density term or, in other words, be different from

$\int_0^1 \,\mathbb{I}_{(0,a)}(u)\,\text{d}u\,,$

What is surprising for me is that the integral

$\int_0^a \,\text{d}u$

has a clear meaning as a Riemann integral, hence should be more intuitive….

This entry was posted on April 8, 2015 at 12:15 am and is filed under Books, R, Statistics, University life with tags accept-reject algorithm, George Casella, Introducing Monte Carlo Methods with R, Lebesgue integration, Riemann integration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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an email exchange about integral representations

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