rnvmix: (Quasi-)Random Number Generation for Multivariate Normal...

In nvmix: Multivariate Normal Variance Mixtures

(Quasi-)Random Number Generation for Multivariate Normal Variance Mixtures

Description

Generate vectors of random variates from multivariate normal variance mixtures (including Student t and normal distributions).

Usage

rnvmix(n, rmix, qmix, loc = rep(0, d), scale = diag(2),
       factor = NULL, method = c("PRNG", "sobol", "ghalton"),
       skip = 0, ...)

rStudent(n, df, loc = rep(0, d), scale = diag(2), factor = NULL,
         method = c("PRNG", "sobol", "ghalton"), skip = 0)
rNorm(n, loc = rep(0, d), scale = diag(2), factor = NULL,
      method = c("PRNG", "sobol", "ghalton"), skip = 0)
rNorm_sumconstr(n, weights, s, method = c("PRNG", "sobol", "ghalton"), skip = 0)

Arguments

n	sample size n (positive integer).
rmix	specification of the mixing variable W, see McNeil et al. (2015, Chapter 6) and Hintz et al. (2020), via a random number generator. This argument is ignored for method = "sobol" and method = "ghalton". Supported are the following types of specification (see also the examples below): character: character string specifying a supported distribution; currently available are "constant" (in which case W = 1 and thus a sample from the multivariate normal distribution with mean vector loc and covariance matrix scale results) and "inverse.gamma" (in which case W is inverse gamma distributed with shape and rate parameters df/2 and thus the multivariate Student t distribution with df degrees of freedom (required to be provided via the ellipsis argument) results). list: list of length at least one, where the first component is a character string specifying the base name of a distribution which can be sampled via prefix "r"; an example is "exp" for which "rexp" exists for sampling. If the list is of length larger than one, the remaining elements contain additional parameters of the distribution; for "exp", for example, this can be the parameter rate. function: function interpreted as a random number generator of the mixing variable W; additional arguments (such as parameters) can be passed via the ellipsis argument. numeric: numeric vector of length n providing a random sample of the mixing variable W.
qmix	specification of the mixing variable W via a quantile function. This argument is required for method = "sobol" and method = "ghalton". Supported are the following types of specification (see also the examples below): character: character string specifying a supported distribution; currently available are "constant" (in which case W = 1 and thus a sample from the multivariate normal distribution with mean vector loc and covariance matrix scale results) and "inverse.gamma" (in which case W is inverse gamma distributed with shape and rate parameters df/2 and thus the multivariate Student t distribution with df degrees of freedom (required to be provided via the ellipsis argument) results). list: list of length at least one, where the first component is a character string specifying the base name of a distribution which can be sampled via prefix "q"; an example is "exp" for which "qexp" exists for sampling. If the list is of length larger than one, the remaining elements contain additional parameters of the distribution; for "exp", for example, this can be the parameter rate. function: function interpreted as the quantile function of the mixing variable W; internally, sampling is then done with the inversion method by applying the provided function to U(0,1) random variates.
df	positive degress of freedom; can also be Inf in which case the distribution is interpreted as the multivariate normal distribution with mean vector loc and covariance matrix scale).
loc	location vector of dimension d; this equals the mean vector of a random vector following the specified normal variance mixture distribution if and only if the latter exists.
scale	scale matrix (a covariance matrix entering the distribution as a parameter) of dimension (d, d) (defaults to d = 2); this equals the covariance matrix of a random vector following the specified normal variance mixture distribution divided by the expecation of the mixing variable W if and only if the former exists. Note that scale must be positive definite; sampling from singular normal variance mixtures can be achieved by providing factor.
factor	(d, k)-matrix such that factor %*% t(factor) equals scale; the non-square case k \neq d can be used to sample from singular normal variance mixtures. Note that this notation coincides with McNeil et al. (2015, Chapter 6). If not provided, factor is internally determined via chol() (and multiplied from the right to an (n, k)-matrix of independent standard normals to obtain a sample from a multivariate normal with zero mean vector and covariance matrix scale).
method	character string indicating the method to be used to obtain the sample. Available are: "PRNG": pseudo-random numbers, "sobol": Sobol' sequence, "ghalton": generalized Halton sequence. If method = "PRNG", either qmix or rmix can be provided. If both are provided, rmix is used and qmix ignored. For the other two methods, sampling is done via inversion, hence qmix has to be provided and rmix is ignored.
skip	integer specifying the number of points to be skipped when method = "sobol", see also example below.
weights	d-numeric vector of weights.
s	numeric vector of length 1 or n giving the value of the constrained sum; see below under details.
...	additional arguments (for example, parameters) passed to the underlying mixing distribution when rmix or qmix is a character string or function.

Details

Internally used is factor, so scale is not required to be provided if factor is given.

The default factorization used to obtain factor is the Cholesky decomposition via chol(). To this end, scale needs to have full rank.

Sampling from a singular normal variance mixture distribution can be achieved by providing factor.

The number of rows of factor equals the dimension d of the sample. Typically (but not necessarily), factor is square.

rStudent() and rNorm() are wrappers of rnvmix(, qmix = "inverse.gamma", df = df) and rnvmix(, qmix = "constant", df = df), respectively.

The function rNorm_sumconstr() can be used to sample from the multivariate standard normal distribution under a weighted sum constraint; the implementation is based on Algorithm 1 in Vrins (2018). Let Z = (Z_1,\dots,Z_d)~N_d(0, I_d). The function rNorm_sumconstr() then samples from Z | w^T Z = s where w and s correspond to the arguments weights and s. If supplied s is a vector of length n, the i'th row of the returned matrix uses the constraint w^T Z = s_i where s_i is the i'th element in s.

Value

rnvmix() returns an (n, d)-matrix containing n samples of the specified (via mix) d-dimensional multivariate normal variance mixture with location vector loc and scale matrix scale (a covariance matrix).

rStudent() returns samples from the d-dimensional multivariate Student t distribution with location vector loc and scale matrix scale.

rNorm() returns samples from the d-dimensional multivariate normal distribution with mean vector loc and covariance matrix scale.

rNorm_sumconstr() returns samples from the d-dimensional multivariate normal distribution conditional on the weighted sum being constrained to s.

Author(s)

Erik Hintz, Marius Hofert and Christiane Lemieux

References

Hintz, E., Hofert, M. and Lemieux, C. (2021), Normal variance mixtures: Distribution, density and parameter estimation. Computational Statistics and Data Analysis 157C, 107175.

Hintz, E., Hofert, M. and Lemieux, C. (2022), Multivariate Normal Variance Mixtures in R: The R Package nvmix. Journal of Statistical Software, \Sexpr[results=rd]{tools:::Rd_expr_doi("10.18637/jss.v102.i02")}.

McNeil, A. J., Frey, R. and Embrechts, P. (2015). Quantitative Risk Management: Concepts, Techniques, Tools. Princeton University Press.

Vrins, E. (2018) Sampling the Multivariate Standard Normal Distribution under a Weighted Sum Constraint. Risks 6(3), 64.

See Also

dnvmix(), pnvmix()

Examples

### Examples for rnvmix() ######################################################

## Generate a random correlation matrix in d dimensions
d <- 3
set.seed(157)
A <- matrix(runif(d * d), ncol = d)
P <- cov2cor(A %*% t(A))

## Draw random variates and compare
df <- 3.5
n <- 1000
set.seed(271)
X  <- rnvmix(n, rmix = "inverse.gamma", df = df, scale = P) # with scale
set.seed(271)
X. <- rnvmix(n, rmix = "inverse.gamma", df = df, factor = t(chol(P))) # with factor
stopifnot(all.equal(X, X.))

## Checking df = Inf
set.seed(271)
X <- rnvmix(n, rmix = "constant", scale = P) # normal
set.seed(271)
X. <- rnvmix(n, rmix = "inverse.gamma", scale = P, df = Inf) # t_infinity
stopifnot(all.equal(X, X.))

## Univariate case (dimension = number of rows of 'factor' = 1 here)
set.seed(271)
X.1d  <- rnvmix(n, rmix = "inverse.gamma", df = df, factor = 1/2)
set.seed(271)
X.1d. <- rnvmix(n, rmix = "inverse.gamma", df = df, factor = 1)/2 # manual scaling
stopifnot(all.equal(X.1d, X.1d.))

## Checking different ways of providing 'mix'
## 1) By providing a character string (and corresponding ellipsis arguments)
set.seed(271)
X.mix1 <- rnvmix(n, rmix = "inverse.gamma", df = df, scale = P)
## 2) By providing a list; the first element has to be an existing distribution
##    with random number generator available with prefix "r"
rinverse.gamma <- function(n, df) 1 / rgamma(n, shape = df/2, rate = df/2)
set.seed(271)
X.mix2 <- rnvmix(n, rmix = list("inverse.gamma", df = df), scale = P)
## 3) The same without extra arguments (need the extra list() here to
##    distinguish from Case 1))
rinverseGamma <- function(n) 1 / rgamma(n, shape = df/2, rate = df/2)
set.seed(271)
X.mix3 <- rnvmix(n, rmix = list("inverseGamma"), scale = P)
## 4) By providing a quantile function
##    Note: P(1/Y <= x) = P(Y >= 1/x) = 1-F_Y(1/x) = y <=> x = 1/F_Y^-(1-y)
set.seed(271)
X.mix4 <- rnvmix(n, qmix = function(p) 1/qgamma(1-p, shape = df/2, rate = df/2),
                 scale = P)
## 5) By providing random variates
set.seed(271) # if seed is set here, results are comparable to the above methods
W <- rinverse.gamma(n, df = df)
X.mix5 <- rnvmix(n, rmix = W, scale = P)
## Compare (note that X.mix4 is not 'all equal' with X.mix1 or the other samples)
## since rgamma() != qgamma(runif()) (or qgamma(1-runif()))
stopifnot(all.equal(X.mix2, X.mix1),
          all.equal(X.mix3, X.mix1),
          all.equal(X.mix5, X.mix1))

## For a singular normal variance mixture:
## Need to provide 'factor'
A <- matrix( c(1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1), ncol = 2, byrow = TRUE)
stopifnot(all.equal(dim(rnvmix(n, rmix = "constant", factor = A)),    c(n, 3)))
stopifnot(all.equal(dim(rnvmix(n, rmix = "constant", factor = t(A))), c(n, 2)))

## Using 'skip'. Need to reset the seed everytime to get the same shifts in "sobol".
## Note that when using method = "sobol", we have to provide 'qmix' instead of 'rmix'.
set.seed(271)
X.skip0 <- rnvmix(n, qmix = "inverse.gamma", df = df, scale = P, method = "sobol")
set.seed(271)
X.skip1 <- rnvmix(n, qmix = "inverse.gamma", df = df, scale = P, method = "sobol",
                  skip = n)
set.seed(271)
X.wo.skip <- rnvmix(2*n, qmix = "inverse.gamma", df = df, scale = P, method = "sobol")
X.skip <- rbind(X.skip0, X.skip1)
stopifnot(all.equal(X.wo.skip, X.skip))


### Examples for rStudent() and rNorm() ########################################

## Draw N(0, P) random variates by providing scale or factor and compare
n <- 1000
set.seed(271)
X.n  <- rNorm(n, scale = P) # providing scale
set.seed(271)
X.n. <- rNorm(n, factor = t(chol(P))) # providing the factor
stopifnot(all.equal(X.n, X.n.))

## Univariate case (dimension = number of rows of 'factor' = 1 here)
set.seed(271)
X.n.1d  <- rNorm(n, factor = 1/2)
set.seed(271)
X.n.1d. <- rNorm(n, factor = 1)/2 # manual scaling
stopifnot(all.equal(X.n.1d, X.n.1d.))

## Draw t_3.5 random variates by providing scale or factor and compare
df <- 3.5
n <- 1000
set.seed(271)
X.t  <- rStudent(n, df = df, scale = P) # providing scale
set.seed(271)
X.t. <- rStudent(n, df = df, factor = t(chol(P))) # providing the factor
stopifnot(all.equal(X.t, X.t.))

## Univariate case (dimension = number of rows of 'factor' = 1 here)
set.seed(271)
X.t.1d  <- rStudent(n, df = df, factor = 1/2)
set.seed(271)
X.t.1d. <- rStudent(n, df = df, factor = 1)/2 # manual scaling
stopifnot(all.equal(X.t.1d, X.t.1d.))

## Check df = Inf
set.seed(271)
X.t <- rStudent(n, df = Inf, scale = P)
set.seed(271)
X.n <- rNorm(n, scale = P)
stopifnot(all.equal(X.t, X.n))

### Examples for rNorm_sumconstr() #############################################
set.seed(271)
weights <- c(1, 1)
Z.constr <- rNorm_sumconstr(n, weights = c(1, 1), s = 2)
stopifnot(all(rowSums(Z.constr ) == 2))
plot(Z.constr , xlab = expression(Z[1]), ylab = expression(Z[2]))

nvmix documentation built on July 24, 2025, 3:02 a.m.