A Bifurcation Monte Carlo Scheme for Rare Event Simulation

Abstract

The bifurcation method is a way to do rare event sampling -- to estimate the probability of events that are too rare to be found by direct simulation. We describe the bifurcation method and use it to estimate the transition rate of a double well potential problem. We show that the associated constrained path sampling problem can be addressed by a combination of Crooks-Chandler sampling and parallel tempering and marginalization.